In 57 BC, Rome faced a serious crisis. The streets and marketplaces of Rome were filled with protesters, who loudly vented their frustration towards their political elites. Angry mobs disrupted the theatre, forcing spectators to abandon their seats and flee in fear, whilst violent clashes broke out across the city. The cause of this discontent was economic in nature – grain shortages had afflicted the city, leaving food prices high and the urban plebs hungry.

Violent disturbances were not unusual in Ancient Rome, and by the Late Republic they had become increasingly common. Without anything resembling a formal police force, public justice was a well understood aspect of Roman social history, with the urban populace from time to time using brute force to remedy perceived injustices. The corn crisis of 57 and the Roman political system’s response to it can tell us a great deal about how Roman politics dealt with social unrest – and also the wider implications such uprisings would have on the state.

The grain shortage of 57 was the result of multiple converging factors, which together had brought about surging grain prices. In the Late Republic, the population of Rome had surged to around one million inhabitants, with the city’s size driven by Rome’s expanding empire and the city’s growing economic prosperity. In the preceding decade, piracy across the Mediterranean had caused widespread disruption to grain supply routes, until the Senate instructed the general and politician Pompey the Great to tackle the issue – which he quickly brought under control. Despite this, poor harvests and further disruptions to corn supplies across Rome’s vast empire had seen grain shortages emerge once again. However, this time around, politics had exacerbated the issue.

In 58, Publius Clodius Pulcher, a populist Tribune, had initiated reforms to the public dole system in a bid to win himself favour with urban voters. In that year Clodius passed the lex Clodia frumentaria, which significantly expanded the eligibility list for the grain dole to greater numbers of people – and for free, at significant cost to the state. This measure bought Clodius popularity with the plebs, but placed additional stress on an already stretched grain supply system. Additionally, the manumission of slaves was increasingly becoming a common practice among slave owners during this period, allowing households to receive a greater share of the dole through the eligibility of their now freed slaves. In 57, both trends increased the pressure on Rome’s grain supplies.

However, political machinations would have a further part to play in the grain crisis. In the previous year, Clodius had successfully campaigned to have Marcus Tullius Cicero exiled from Rome. Publicly, Clodius charged Cicero with executing Roman citizens without trial during his consulship in 63, but the real motivation was a personal feud with Cicero and a desire to remove him from public life. Having spent the year in exile, Cicero returned to Rome in 57 to public acclaim, aided by Pompey – who raised bands of supporters and heavies to push through his recall. Both sides seized on the grain crisis as a political weapon: Clodius blaming the influx of Cicero’s supporters for exacerbating demand for grain, and Cicero condemning his rival for mismanaging the grain supply.

In the back-and-forth politics of Ancient Rome, the truth was blurred by political manoeuvring. But to the urban plebs, the reality was clear: they were hungry, and they wanted their government to react. Disturbances broke out across the city and sessions of the Senate were disrupted, leaving Roman politicians with no doubt that the situation needed to be addressed – and quickly.

However, if the political blame for the crisis was unclear, the Roman state’s response was anything but. That year, the Senate passed a decree (and the consuls passed a law) that granted Pompey a five-year command to oversee Rome’s grain supply and bring the crisis under control. The command would place enormous power in the hands of Pompey, including complete authority over the entire grain supply across Roman territory, command of an army and fleet to protect supplies, the ability to appoint his own deputies (legates) to administer the grain supply of different provinces and access to state funds for the purchase and distribution of grain. In Plutarch’s account:

“Thus Pompey being appointed chief purveyor, and having within his administration and management all the corn trade, sent abroad his factors and agents into all quarters, and he himself sailing into Sicily, Sardinia, and Africa, collected vast stores of corn.”

Pompey took to his task with energy and his actions were effective: the price of grain fell and access to supplies stabilised, helping to bring calm to Rome. Plutarch records that Pompey:

“made a prosperous return, and filled the markets with corn, and the sea with ships. So much so that this great plenty and abundance of provisions yielded a sufficient supply, not only to the city of Rome, but even to other places too, dispersing itself; like waters from a spring, into all quarters.”

As Erich Gruen notes in his survey of this period, The Last Generation of the Roman Republic, Pompey’s actions were swift and effective, and as a result “the psychological effect was potent, and the crisis passed”. The affair would have important implications for Roman politics. Pompey, who was already a leading politician and respected general, furthered his position as the leading political figure of the Republic’s final years.

Some historians have tended to point to Pompey’s command as evidence of the Republic’s growing reliance on powerful figures with large, loyal armies under their command - a trend that would continue with Julius Caesar. However, Gruen also points to the confidence and decisiveness with which the Roman state – and its elites – tackled the grain crisis. The state was able to adapt quickly to this instance of urban discontent and act flexibly to grant Pompey a wide-ranging command, backed up by soldiers and funds.

The corn shortage highlights one of the central elements of Rome’s political system that allowed it to become the most powerful empire in the world: the ability (and willingness) of its institutions to act decisively on key matters and to respond to the concerns of its own populace.

Many countries in the Western world today face their own age of discontent: trust in institutions remains consistently low in the US and Europe, with polling showing widespread disapproval at the ability of governments to tackle the major issues they face today. If lessons can be learned from Ancient Rome, civilisations with flexible institutions create a more receptive state – and one that responds more effectively to crises. The Roman elite understood this well, and it would be to our benefit if today’s policymakers could also understand this lesson.

The present age is undoubtedly defined by populist politics. However, the ability of populists to turn public grievances into political support is not unique to our own society, with the Roman Republic experiencing its own ancient examples of populism. Indeed, populism was not only a factor in Roman politics, but an intended feature of its political system – allowing ambitious politicians to build their supporter base within the confines of the republic’s traditional power structure.

Despite occurring throughout Roman history, populism did not bring the republic to its knees. Instead, it was a feature of political life that the Romans managed within their political system, allowing grievances to be redressed and an outlet for popular discontent. To understand the role of populism in the Ciceronian age, we need to understand how populists operated and, in contrast, how the Roman elite themselves could use populist causes to their own advantage.

If you were a politician in the late Roman Republic looking to take up a populist cause, your policy choices were varied – from championing the appointment of popular commanders to certain military commands, to the sponsorship of cheap entertainment for the urban masses. However, there was a collection of core populist policies that Roman politicians could lean into to gain favour with the people.

Foremost among these was the issue of land redistribution and agrarian reform. This involved the breaking up of larger estates in the countryside into smaller plots that could be redistributed to the urban poor. However, as Senators and equites (the Roman business class) often owned these large estates, this was a particularly sensitive topic and was usually shot down by fierce opposition.

However, the redistribution of land to veterans was one area that did see political success. Successful generals returning to Rome were keen to reward their loyal soldiers with allocations of land, helping to keep their allegiance and earning them a ready base of political support. In the Ciceronian age, Pompey the Great was able to secure land for his troops in Campania via Julius Caesar, who used his year as consul (59 BC) to bring forth a measure on Pompey’s behalf. Pompey was faced with strong senatorial opposition and various delaying tactics from his opponents. However, Caesar was able to appeal directly to the Popular Assembly and outmanoeuvre Bibulus, his fellow consul and ally of the conservatives in the Senate.

The grain dole was another core populist policy. In Ancient Rome, grain was subsidised by the state and provided to urban citizens at a reduced price, helping to alleviate food shortages and financial pressures. In the late republic, as the city grew to almost one million residents, the logistics and distribution of the grain dole would become increasingly complex – and more important. Roman politicians could capitalise on this by either securing the supply of grain to the city, or by enacting measures to increase the size and scope of the grain dole.

The clearest example of this is the Lex Frumentaria instituted by Publius Clodius Pulcher, a populist rabble-rouser and street thug. In 58 BC, Clodius, who was serving his term as tribune, expanded eligibility for the dole to all adult males and provided it free of charge, rather than at a reduced rate. Although Clodius had a career marked by populism and demagoguery, he was not the only politician in the late republic to take an interest in the grain dole.

In 62 BC, an earlier bill was brought forward to increase the recipients of the dole. The bill was sponsored by the ultra-conservative Marcus Porcius Cato, a politician known for his deeply traditional views and fierce opposition to populism. Furthermore, Caesar himself had floated the idea of reforming the dole during his consulship of 59 BC, and in 70 BC, Marcus Licinius Crassus funded the dole out of his own pocket for three months. The range of politicians who supported this cause – from demagogues like Clodius to traditional statesmen such as Cato - showcases how populist causes could be supported by politicians for their own gain, regardless of their faction within the Senate.

At the more extreme end of the policy scale was the promise of debt relief for the urban poor, which Roman politicians could champion at times of serious economic hardship. This was one of the measures allegedly pushed by Catiline, a disgruntled politician who plotted to overthrow the republic and murder the Senate, until the plot was uncovered by Cicero during his consulship of 63 BC. The Roman historian Sallust outlines how Catiline gained supporters and built his following:

Thereupon Catiline promised abolition of debts, the proscription of the rich, offices, priesthoods, plunder, and all the other spoils that war and the license of victors can offer.

The Catilinarian Conspiracy occurred at a time of great indebtedness in Rome. This was driven by easy access to credit and the ending of the Mithridatic War, which opened up new investment markets in the East and therefore pressured moneylenders and financiers to recall loans made in the previous years. It is no coincidence that Catiline championed the issue of debt relief at this time, given the wider economic position that many Romans now found themselves in.

The range of populist policies, spanning from land redistribution to debt cancellation, had one thing in common: Roman politicians could use them to appeal directly to the urban populace and bypass the Senate, pushing reforms against the wishes of the Roman elite. That does not mean that these causes were always successful or even regularly forced political change. For the most part, truly radical reforms that risked destabilising Rome were blocked by elites, who were minded to protect their own interests and who valued stability over all else.

However, from time to time, the exploits of skilled politicians could bring about needed reforms, even if they were watered down to a far greater extent than the Rome people may have wanted.

But who were the politicians that took up these causes? As it turns out, the champions of populist causes would transcend political factions. To be sure, there were genuine populists and rabble-rousers in the late Roman Republic. Clodius, mentioned previously in the context of the grain dole, was a genuine political miscreant who frequently utilised populist causes to further his own career. However, even Clodius can be seen sponsoring sensible legislation throughout his career, including much needed reforms to administrative affairs.

Likewise, elected tribunes, who were tasked with representing the will of the people, would often use their time in office to espouse populist policies. The position of tribune was a unique part of the Roman system: ten tribunes were elected each year, with the position only open to plebeians. Tribunes had the ability to veto actions taken by the senate and could introduce legislation directly to the people, and at the same time had strong legal protections when in office – obstructing a tribune was a capital offence in Ancient Rome.

However, these were usually young aristocrats looking to make a name for themselves, even if the measures they proposed were eventually vetoed by their colleagues. For the most part, it was expected that these politicians would return to the standard conservative norms of Roman politics once their term ended, before they proceeded to higher offices.

The way in which populist policies could be used for personal advancement, rather than as part of a genuine political programme, can be seen in the wide range of names associated with populist measures. As mentioned previously, Cato, Pompey, Caesar and Clodius can all be seen sponsoring measures on land reform and the grain dole in the Late Republic – showing how both the conservative faction and its opponents could take up the populist banner when politically advantageous.

In his landmark study of Roman Politics, The Last Generation of the Roman Republic, Erich Gruen favours the view that, for the most part, Roman society experienced demagogic devices and not demagogues. That is to say: populism was a tool used by the Roman elite to win favour with the populace, with Roman politics maintaining its conservative character to the end of the republic. From land redistribution to the grain dole, Roman politics had room for populist policies, but only within the confines of the political battles between its mostly conservative elites.

Societies have always faced challenges to their traditional values, especially when the values of their elites have diverged from the rest of the citizenry. Ancient Rome experienced this same tension between new values and ideologies from the East and what many traditionalists viewed as Rome’s moral virtues.

The face of this contest between the new and the old in the first century BC was Marcus Porcius Cato – also known as Cato the Elder (234-149 BC). Cato built has career through military successes, rising to the top of Roman politics from humble origins. But he is best known for his fierce opposition to the Hellenization of the Roman aristocracy and the departure of the elite away from traditional Roman values. Cato’s career and the battle of ideas he engaged in with this elite provide an insight into the changing nature of elite ideology, both in the ancient world and today.

Cato wasn’t born into the Roman elite. He was born in Tusculum, a provincial city outside of Rome, to a family who were part of the local aristocracy but certainly not a Roman patrician family. Cato’s world was shaped by the Second Punic War, which began in 218 BC and saw Hannibal crossing the Alps and invading Italy. Cato enlisted in the army at seventeen and spent the next thirteen years campaigning across Italy, where he rose through the ranks and became a military tribune.

After the war ended with a Roman victory in 201 BC, Cato was able to leverage his military exploits to build himself a political career. He served as quaestor (204 BC), aedile (199 BC) and praetor (198 BC), where he built a reputation for moral discipline and the rejection of luxury. As praetor, he was tasked with governing the Roman province of Sardinia, where he undertook an anti-corruption campaign and massively reduced his expenses as governor.

During this time, he gained the support of a powerful member of the Roman aristocracy, Lucius Valerius Flaccus, who helped to legitimise Cato in the eyes of the Roman elite. Through his relationship with Flaccus, Cato would reach the pinnacle of Roman politics and was elected consul in 195 BC. Cato’s commitment to traditional Roman ideals and the ‘simple life’ had gained him many admirers both in Rome and abroad, with Plutarch noting that he “was contented with a cold breakfast, a frugal dinner, simple raiment, and a humble dwelling, — one who thought more of not wanting the superfluities of life than of possessing them, — such a man was rare.”

As consul, Cato would clash a number of times with others on ideological grounds. He opposed the repealing of the Lex Oppia, a law devised during the Punic War to limit the amount of wealth that a woman could hold. Specifically, the law forbade women to possess more than a certain amount of gold and outlawed the wearing of multicoloured garments, all in the name of driving down spending on luxury items during the difficult war years.

With the war now over, attempts were made to have the law repealed – but Cato opposed this vigorously, claiming that once this limit was removed, women’s spending would become uncontrollable, and luxuries would further permeate across Roman society.

Crowds of women gathered around the Forum and asked senators and officials to repeal the law, with Flaccus himself supporting their cause as the other consul for the year. Their opposition was too strong, and Cato’s attempt to preserve the law eventually failed, and it was repealed that year. The affair highlights Cato’s fierce attempts to resist any change that he felt eroded Roman values and its traditional culture.

After his year in office as consul, Cato was granted a command in Spain, where his successes generated vast riches from the mines in the region. He was generous with this loot, with Plutarch proclaiming that Cato felt “it was better to have many Romans go home with silver in their pockets⁠ than a few with gold.”

However, Cato himself did not partake in this loot, stating “I prefer to strive in bravery with the bravest, rather than in wealth with the richest, and in greed for money with the greediest.” Further campaigning in Greece would follow, with Cato heavily involved in Rome’s war and eventual victory against Antiochus III.

Banishing the philosophers

By this time, Cato was both a distinguished commander and politician. But in the years to come, his reputation was to be challenged as campaigning began for the office of censor. The censorship was a unique political office in the Roman Republic. Its holders were responsible for overseeing the census and property lists, alongside holding responsibility for public conduct and administering state contracts. This gave censors a significant amount of political power.

As elections for the censorship were infrequent, occurring every five years, achieving this office was highly competitive – and Cato failed at his first attempt in 189. However, five years later he was elected to become censor, and he immediately took it upon himself to impose conservative policies. This included raising taxes on luxury goods, alongside expelling a number of individuals from the Senate for various moral scandals and poor behaviour.

However, Cato also had ambitions to improve the lives of Romans in a more practical way, using his position as censor to build new roads and improving Rome’s sewage system. Cato could certainly be accused of being obstinate when it came to his ideology, but he could be forward-thinking when it came to administrative affairs.

At this point in his career, Cato the Elder was the most influential conservative in Roman society, championing traditionalist values and Roman ideals from the highest political positions in the republic. However, his staunch conservatism would continue to influence affairs within Rome. In 155 BC, more than thirty years after Cato’s election to the censorship, a delegation of Greek philosophers entered Rome and began teaching their beliefs. The philosophers Carneades and Diogenes had arrived as part of a diplomatic embassy from Athens, bringing their thoughts on stoicism and scepticism with them. To Cato, this was an affront to the traditional Roman values he had spent his career defending – discipline, hard work and the simple life. Even worse, the Roman youth flocked to these philosophers, keen to hear their teachings. As Plutarch reports:

The charm of Carneades especially, which had boundless power, and a fame not inferior to its power, won large and sympathetic audiences, and filled the city, like a rushing mighty wind, with the noise of his praises. Report spread far and wide that a Greek of amazing talent, who disarmed all opposition by the magic of his eloquence, had infused a tremendous passion into the youth of the city, in consequence of which they forsook their other pleasures and pursuits and were “possessed” about philosophy.

Cato “was distressed, fearing lest the young men, by giving this direction to their ambition, should come to love a reputation based on mere words more than one achieved by martial deeds” and when the philosophers were invited to speak before the Senate, he resolved to put an end to their diplomatic mission and have them removed from the city. Cato rose in the Senate and urged his colleagues “to make up our minds one way or another, and vote on what the embassy proposes, in order that these men may return to their schools and lecture to the sons of Greece”.

With Cato’s intervention, the diplomatic mission was sent back to Greece and essentially banished from the city, ending their rise to fame in Rome. Cato himself would spend the remainder of his career defending Roman traditions, alongside supporting an interventionist foreign policy against Rome’s great enemy, Carthage. His determination to end the Carthaginian threat once and for all led to him ending all his speeches in the Senate with “Carthage must be destroyed”.

Cato’s career is marked by his defence of tradition, simplicity, hard work and austerity. However, it also shows a broader theme within the Roman Republic: the influence of external ideas, and particularly Greek philosophy, on the Roman elite. This transformation of elite culture would accelerate even further as the Greek and Roman worlds became even more intertwined as Rome’s empire expanded further eastwards.

However, this clash between those who embraced these new ideological values and the conservatives who opposed them would continue until the end of the Roman Republic and into the imperial period. Cato may have achieved his goal of banishing the Greek delegation - and their philosophical musings - from Rome, but their thoughts would outlive their time in the city.

From the Optimates of the first century BC, who feared Julius Caesar’s ambitions to seize the state, to the moral reforms of Augustus Caesar a generation later, concerns over ancestral values and the moral fate of Rome would remain. The career trajectory of Cato and his fierce opposition to what he perceived as moral and philosophical threats to ‘Roman values’ showcases how elite values can change over time, alongside the conservative opposition that can emerge from such changes.

The term ‘oligarchy’ has been applied to many different societies throughout history, both ancient and modern. When Plato outlined the different forms of government in Republic, he defined how an oligarchy would work in stark terms. To Plato, an oligarchy is a state run in parallel ways: one society for the rich and another for the poor. In an oligarchic system, society values wealth over virtue, elevating men to status based solely on their wealth. The oligarchs would fear their own subjects and were hesitant to contribute money to society, leaving the nation unable to fulfil its key functions, such as waging war.

In Plato’s view, these societies were doomed, transitioning first into democracy (which he viewed as unlimited freedom) and then devolving into tyranny when the disparity between rich and poor became too apparent and the conditions for revolution presented themselves. In Republic, Plato describes the system in simple terms:

‘And what exactly do you mean by an oligarchy?’ ‘A political system where it is wealth that counts’ I said, ‘and in which political power is in the hands of the rich and the poor have no share of it.’

From the writings of Plato through to the modern age, the balance between power and wealth has been a consistent theme in politics. In today’s era of disrupted politics, parts of the western world have been accused by both detractors and its own citizens of devolving into an oligarchy. So, what does it mean to live in an oligarchic state? And what can we learn from historical examples of such societies in the past?

The oligarchs

Put in its most direct form, an oligarchic society involves the concentration of political power in the hands of a small elite, usually based on wealth or lineage. Its key political attributes include political institutions (courts, elections and tax collection) that favour the interests of this elite, alongside the limiting of political participation for the non-elite majority.

There is no shortage of such societies across history. The Roman Republic provided many of the foundations of modern democracy: an elected senate, independent courts and a complex administrative and legal framework. However, it was also a state in which political control usually flowed to a handful of powerful families, who ensured voting rights favoured wealthy landowners in the countryside. By developing a deeply ingrained system of personal patronage, these powerful families could control the political process and ensure their interests were represented by the Roman state.

Reformers did attempt to wrestle control of political power from the Roman elite. Two tribunes, the brothers Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, launched a populist program of political reform in the 2^nd century BC, championing land redistribution and the expansion of the dole, following a rise in slave labour across the Italian peninsula. But the elite backlash that followed would see the Gracchi brothers pay for their stance with their lives and their efforts would fail to produce the reforms they hoped for.

Elite power was so entrenched in the Roman Republic that by the time Cicero was elected Consul in 63 BC, it would mark a rare occasion: a new man (novus homo) reaching the top political position in Rome. Between 69-60 BC, seventeen out of the twenty-one consuls elected had an ancestor that previously held the office.

The Roman Republic would experience periods of unrest in its final century, until eventually collapsing and being transformed under the reign of Augustus Caesar. This included a civil war between Marius and Sulla in the 80s BC and, thirty years later, another civil war between Caesar and the conservative Optimates over which faction of elites should rule supreme in Rome.

More recent examples also illustrate the pressures that oligarchical societies face. Britain in the 19^th century was a state marked by aristocratic dominance and limited suffrage, with landownership providing political power and the House of Lords still dominated by hereditary peers. In particular, the boundaries of many constituencies had been left unchanged for many years, leaving the booming cities of the industrial revolution underrepresented. This concentrated political power in the rural ‘rotten boroughs’, tiny rural constituencies that were easily controlled by powerful aristocrats.

The industrial revolution saw a major transfer of power towards the new business elite, with the titans of industry, commerce and finance amassing wealth on such a scale that they were able to eclipse the old aristocracy. However, the disruption to traditional ways of living and the innovation of new technology that the industrial revolution would produce created its own political momentum, spurring a number of movements for democratic reform.

The new middle classes of the industrial revolution, comprised of professionals and merchants, increasingly wanted political power to match their newfound economic position. Reform Acts in 1832, 1867 and 1884 would create new constituencies and reform the electoral system, enfranchising a greater percentage of the population and shifting political power towards the new cities of the Victorian industrial boom.

From Ancient Rome to Victorian Britain, we can see how oligarchs have amassed and exercised power across the ages – and how the ruthless pursuit of personal power has ushered in new periods of political upheaval.

These societies reflect a core aspect of all civilisations across history: inequality. The ruling oligarchs themselves have often argued that they are upholding stability, continuity and tradition. However, by entrenching corruption and self-enrichment, the oligarchs of Ancient Rome and beyond distorted the natural competition between human beings. This produced a politics of exclusion, giving rise to unrest and populist backlash – and eventually bringing down the old regime.

Although criticism of oligarchs has traditionally been viewed through the lens of left-wing politics, there is a strong conservative case for opposing oligarchic systems, with principles of free competition, individual liberty and political participation all being infringed upon by the establishment of a self-serving oligarchy.

In today’s globalised world, the populist right has also taken aim at modern-day oligarchs in another way. Populist movements in the US, Europe and beyond have accused globalist oligarchs of undermining national values and assaulting local identity, alongside waging a war on national sovereignty.

This critique from the right has attacked groups of economic and political elites for showing a scepticism towards ‘the people’ and a disdain for mass rule. History tells us that an excessive oligarchy can only lead to instability and conflict, eventually producing a new set of political elites who are able to harness this unrest to their advantage.

Britain in the late nineteenth century had no shortage of foreign policy issues to contend with. Whether dealing with colonial affairs across the British Empire or handling an ascendant Germany on the continent, major questions of foreign policy would have far-reaching consequences for Britain and the world. But by the 1870s, statesmen across Westminster would also have another factor to contend with when it came to foreign policy – mass democracy.

The Reform Acts had significantly expanded the franchise, with politics no longer confined to the realm of aristocrats and wealthy landowners. With the passing of the 1867 Reform Act, a whole new segment of the urban working class – artisans, skilled workers and clerks – now had a direct say in the democratic process. For Britain and its approach to foreign policy, this had two key developments.

Firstly, a wider electoral base meant that public speeches and rallies would become a much more effective tool for communicating with potential voters, supplanting the previous system of private patronage and personal relationships. Secondly, newspapers were increasingly becoming a powerful tool for communicating with the newly enfranchised population – and for swaying public opinion.

The convergence of foreign policy and mass democracy can be seen clearly through the career of William Ewart Gladstone, the Liberal Prime Minister who, when facing retirement from politics, staged an unlikely political comeback by taking his fierce criticisms of British foreign policy directly to the people.

Realpolitik

After the 1874 election, which saw the Conservatives win their first majority in a generation against Gladstone’s Liberals, Gladstone opted to step down as leader of the Liberal Party and focus his energy away from politics, becoming a backbench MP. The new Conservative Government soon undertook a more interventionist foreign policy, becoming increasingly involved in continental and world affairs. The outbreak of war in Afghanistan (1878) and the Zulu War (1879) in Southern Africa underlined Britain’s foreign policy approach under the new government, but it was affairs within Europe that particularly enraged Gladstone.

In 1875, an uprising broke out in Herzegovina against Ottoman rule. Known as the ‘sick man of Europe’ due a continual period of decline, the Ottoman state was increasingly struggling to keep control over its empire, and by 1876, the uprising had spread to Bulgaria. The Ottomans crushed the uprising with force, killing more than 15,000 Bulgarians and committing atrocities against the local population.

Back in Britain, the government’s response to the situation was muted. Despite public outrage, Benjamin Disraeli’s Conservative Government had taken a pro-Ottoman stance, with Disraeli viewing the Ottoman Empire as a buffer against Russian expansion. The Russo-Turkish War (1877-1878) and resulting peace settlement at the Congress of Berlin (1878), which saw the British push for a revision of Russian influence over the Balkans, would emphasise the realpolitik practised by Britain towards the Ottoman Empire. In Disraeli’s own words, his interest in the Ottoman Empire was solely ‘to maintain the honour and interests of this country’ whilst avoiding becoming embroiled in a larger conflict with Russia.

Back at home, Gladstone’s opposition to British realpolitik was gaining traction. He was strongly moved by the plight of the Bulgarians but, as he was no longer leader of the Liberal Party, he initially refrained from taking a public stance on the matter. However, after pressure from the pioneering investigative journalist W.T. Stead, Gladstone took a more active role in the debate, writing and publishing a pamphlet titled The Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East. The pamphlet outlined the moral case for opposing the atrocities and was highly critical of the government’s lack of transparency:

For not weeks only but months together, appeal after appeal was made to the Government to supply Parliament with full and authentic information, in lieu of the scanty and uncertain notices which alone could be obtained from unofficial sources.

Gladstone took aim at the inaction of the Disraeli Government and its fence-sitting, criticising the government’s passive claim that:

the wholesale murders, rapes, tortures, burnings, and the whole devilish enginery of crime, "were to be mitigated and softened as much as possible."

Gladstone’s pamphlet was an instant hit, selling over 200,000 copies in just one month. His depiction of the affair as a ‘Turkish inferno’ and calls for the British fleet in the Mediterranean to be utilised “for the defence of innocent lives, and to prevent the repetition of those recent scenes, at which hell itself might almost blush” resonated with the British public.

The Midlothian Campaign

Gladstone’s support for a ‘moral foreign policy’ provided the backdrop to his political comeback. In 1879, he agreed to run for the Midlothian seat in the 1880 general election – a Conservative-held rural constituency on the outskirts of Edinburgh. The Earl of Dalkeith was the Conservative MP that Gladstone would have to overcome to win the seat, so he took his case once again directly to the people.

The campaign became known as the Midlothian Campaign due to Gladstone’s extensive use of political rallies, foreshadowing modern campaigning techniques. The Earl of Rosebery, a Liberal politician and future Prime Minister, sponsored his campaign and acted as his campaign manager, with Gladstone travelling across Midlothian to give speeches at large public rallies.

He addressed 20,000 people at Edinburgh’s Waverley Market and in November 1879 he addressed up to 5000 in Dalkeith, delivering a fiery critique of government policy. Gladstone addressed a range of issues during his campaign, rallying against colonial wars, income tax, agricultural policy and Scottish affairs, and even took the time to speak at a Ladies meeting in the constituency, where he once again heavily criticised Britain’s colonial wars in Africa and Afghanistan.

During the Midlothian Campaign, Gladstone reused the classic Liberal slogan of ‘Peace, Retrenchment and Reform’, which called for a policy of avoiding foreign wars, reducing government debt and instituting political reforms. Both locally and nationally, the campaign was a success – with both Gladstone winning the Midlothian seat and the Liberals winning the general election.

With Gladstone’s position bolstered by the Midlothian Campaign, he once again returned to Downing Street and became Prime Minister, leading a Liberal Government after six years of Conservative rule.

The Midlothian Campaign saw Gladstone combine his moral approach to foreign policy with modern democratic techniques, enabling him to present his views on the Ottoman Empire and colonial affairs directly to the newly broadened electorate. It would prove to be a crucial moment in the development of modern political campaigning, with Gladstone turning popular concerns over foreign policy into a political advantage.

Realpolitik would continue to influence decision-making within the British Empire, but the masses were now increasingly making their voices heard in the realm of foreign policy.

The European exploration of Africa in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would transform the lives of billions of people, bringing commerce, conflict and colonialism to Africa on a continental scale. Until the eighteenth century, large parts of Africa were untouched by the European powers: much of its interior was completely unknown to the outside world, with Europeans having little knowledge about its people, customs or culture.

A dinner meeting at St. Alban's Tavern in London may seem an unlikely starting point for the conquest of an entire continent, but the British foray into Africa can trace its roots to one particular Monday evening. On the evening of 9 June 1788, a group of explorers, geographers and botanists gathered for dinner in an upstairs room of the tavern, where they founded the Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa. The group, known for short as the African Association, aimed to improve European knowledge about Africa and fund risky explorations of the continent’s vast interior. A record of the Association’s founding outlines its purpose in grand terms:

That as no species of information is more ardently desired, or more generally useful, than that which improves the science of Geography; and as the vast Continent of Africa, notwithstanding the efforts of the Antients, and the wishes of the Moderns, is still in a great measure unexplored, the Members of this Club do form themselves into an Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Inland Parts of that Quarter of the World.

The Association was led in its early days by Sir Joseph Banks, a distinguished botanist and naturalist. Banks established a reputation for himself by accompanying Captain James Cook on his first voyage to the South Pacific (1768-1771), before becoming an adviser to King George III on the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew and a leading advocate of the colonisation of Australia. Under his guidance, the Association’s aristocratic members agreed to contribute an annual fee of five guineas, which would directly fund British explorers to undertake (often dangerous) explorations of Africa.

However, the first exploration funded by the Association would quickly showcase how difficult the undertaking would be. The Association hired John Ledyard, an American explorer and acquaintance of Thomas Jefferson, to chart the Niger River’s source. Ledyard set sail from England in June 1788 and reached Egypt in August, but he was fatally poisoned after accidentally taking an overdose of medication in January 1789.

Around this time, the Association commissioned another explorer, Simon Lucas, to travel from North Africa through to Gambia, where he was tasked with collecting information from the locals. Lucas landed in Tripoli in October 1788, but his journey was delayed due to a rebellion in the region. As Lucas was an experienced diplomat, having spent a number of years as vice-consul in Morocco prior to the expedition, he managed to negotiate the continuation of his journey. Having reached the ancient ruins of Lebida and Misrata, Lucas was forced to cut the expedition short, and he returned to Tripoli in April 1789, before setting sail for England in July.

However, his journey was not a failure: Lucas had managed to gather information about the interior of North Africa by trading with the locals. His accounts were published by the African Association and demonstrated the progress that the Association could make through its funds.

As time went on, the expeditions became increasingly ambitious – and the Association’s reputation quickly grew. In 1790, the Association commissioned an Irish major named Daniel Houghton to travel from Gambia to Niger, traversing through the continent’s unforgiving interior. Houghton managed to explore more of Africa’s interior than any European had previously managed, before being robbed and killed 500 miles short of Timbuktu. Houghton’s progress encouraged the Association to lobby the British Government to take a greater role in Gambia and to seek out commercial opportunities in the region, where they hoped to take advantage of the "gold-rich lands of the interior which undoubtedly lined the Niger’s banks".

The African Associations’ greatest achievement was yet to come. After lobbying members of the Cabinet, Joseph Banks and other members of the Association thought they had secured the creation of a Consulate in Senegambia, but disagreements with the government over its funding saw the plans delayed. In the meantime, a young Scottish doctor called Mungo Park offered his services to the Association, and it was agreed that he would receive funding to continue Houghton’s work. The interview committee who reviewed his offer noted:

"a young man of no mean talents who has been regularly educated in the medical line.... and sufficiently instructed in the use of Hadley's quadrant to make the necessary observations; geographer enough to trace his path through the wilderness, and not unacquainted with natural history"

Park arrived in Africa in June 1795 and travelled through Gambia, following Houghton’s footsteps. After escaping various tribal conflicts, rapacious rulers and local thieves, he eventually arrived at the Niger River in June 1796, making Park the first European to see the river with his own eyes and chart its course. As he reached the banks of the river, Park recalled, “I hastened to the brink, and having drunk of the water, I lifted up my fervent thanks in prayer to the Great Ruler of all things, for having thus far crowned my endeavours with success”.

Park attempted to traverse the river into Africa’s interior and reach the city of Timbuktu. However, the intense heat and harassment by local thieves forced him to abandon his journey and return to Britain.

Back home, Park had become an overnight hero. News of his progress into the African interior had spread rapidly, and interest in African exploration surged, leading to a sharp rise in membership for the Association. Park published his account of the exploration in Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa (1799), which quickly became a hit. Within a few years, the European elite had been captured by scenes of daring exploration and exotic landscapes, feeding further expeditions to Africa.

Over the next few years, the African Association would continue to fund explorations from Britain, with varying degrees of success. Park himself would lead a larger expedition in 1805 on behalf of the British Government, where he attempted to explore the full course of the Niger River. This attempt ended in failure, with Park and his team dying on the journey.

With the outbreak of war between Britain and Napoleonic France, the British state increasingly took an interest in undertaking further colonial expeditions in Africa, with the public sector playing an increasingly prominent role in African affairs. The African Association saw its influence diminish as the British Government now took the lead, and eventually the Association was merged with the larger Royal Geographical Society in 1831.

Although the Association’s schemes did not always end in success, they would have a major impact on the European colonisation of Africa. The Association helped to shape British imperial aspirations in Africa, encouraging the state to take a more active interest in colonial projects in the region. It also gathered much of the early information held by the European world on the geography, trade networks and political systems of West Africa.

There is also no doubt that the Association was a project undertaken by the British aristocracy. The Association’s membership in 1791 totalled 95 members, which included fifteen dukes and earls, alongside a number of lords and generals. Nearly half of its original members were Scots, and they included various large landowners and wealthy commoners.

The roots and legacy of the Association have divided opinion. To some, the African Association was a philanthropic venture, looking to improve European knowledge of Africa and encourage commerce with the continent. To its critics, it was a tool of the British aristocracy in their hunt for raw materials and new markets, which became increasingly important after the loss of British colonies in America during the American Revolution.

The society has been praised as the 'first geographical society formed not for trading, but for the purpose of promoting African exploration and disseminating information concerning Africa’ and, from a European perspective, this is exactly what it achieved. It was the risks taken by those intrepid explorers, and the members who provided their own capital to fund these schemes, that helped to further the West’s understanding of Africa. The expertise and knowledge gathered by the Association would be crucial in clearing the path for the European colonial conquest of Africa in the nineteenth century and beyond.

In his 1952 BBC Reith Lecture “The Psychology of Encounters”, historian Arnold Toynbee described how certain ideas can become incredibly dangerous when they are removed from their original historical, political and cultural setting. Toynbee outlined how ideas such as nationalism could prosper in 19^th century Western Europe due to the liberal and homogenous culture of countries like France or Britain, but would lead to outbreaks of violence when exported to other parts of the world, such as Eastern Europe or Asia, which lacked this cultural background.

In Toynbee’s view, the rapid transmission of political, theological or social ideas from one culture to another was a real threat to the stability of the receiving culture, leading to what he called “collisions between one civilisation and another”. The arrival of Tsar Alexander I and the victorious Russian army in Paris on 31 March 1814 was one of those moments of cultural transmission. As Alexander triumphantly marched his soldiers down the Champs-Élysées, the defeat of Napoleon was no longer in doubt, whilst the sight of Cossack horsemen parading through the city streets undoubtedly left an impression on the locals.

A victorious Russian entry into the French capital would have seemed impossible only a few years prior: in 1812, Napoleon had won a series of victories in Russia and captured Moscow, with the French army finding the city already set ablaze by the retreating Russians. However, the harsh Russian winter and continued Russian attacks left Napoleon’s army with a growing list of casualties, and a painful retreat back west was to follow. The remainder of the war would see a coalition of European powers grappling with Napoleon’s forces and the conflict eventually ending in his defeat.

Although the entry of Russian and other coalition troops into Paris left French citizens, who were used to European dominance and regular military victories, humiliated and shocked, it would also have a profound impact on the Russian soldiers too. It was not only the grand architecture and imperial splendour of the French capital that would have a lasting effect on Russia’s solders, but also the ideas they would encounter in a foreign land.

The implications of this cultural transmission were not necessarily instantaneous, but the ideals of 19^th century France – nationalism, liberalism and liberty – would have a profound impact on the development of Russian politics in the years to come. A decade later, these ideas would take on a life of their own in Russia itself, during the Decembrist Revolt.

The Decembrist Revolt started like many revolutions have in the past – against a backdrop of chaos and confusion. In the autumn of 1825, Tsar Alexander I had travelled to southern Russia due to the ill health of his wife, Elizabeth Alexeievna. A lung condition and poor nerves had left Elisabeth increasingly frail and her doctors had recommended that she travel to the warmer climate around the Sea of Azov to support her recovery. But during the journey, Alexander himself caught typhus and passed away on 1 December, leaving the Russian throne vacant.

News of the Tsar’s death spread to St Petersburg and quickly sparked a succession crisis. The crisis itself was not caused by a clamour by rival factions for control of Russia, but simply by confusion over who was next in line for the throne. Alexander himself had no children and, to make matters worse, his brother, Grand Duke Konstantin Pavlovich, had already secretly renounced his claim to the throne on account of his marriage to a Polish Catholic aristocrat, who lacked royal blood. As Konstantin was governor-general of Warsaw, news of his decision took time to reach St Petersburg, with the military and other officials swearing an oath of allegiance to Konstantin before his decision was made public.

Konstantin’s decision meant their younger brother, Nicholas, was next in line for the throne. But this series of events had even left Nicholas himself unsure of his position, and he spent several days assessing his options. With Russia without a Tsar and two potential emperors downplaying their claim, a power vacuum gripped Russian politics, allowing radical groups to seize their opportunity.

These radical groups were composed of liberals and reformers, many of whom had served in the Napoleonic War and experienced western liberalism first-hand in the West. In the intervening years, societies such as the Union of Salvation, Union of Prosperity, Northern Society and Southern Society were founded in Russia with the goal of removing its autocratic political system and reshaping the nation along Western liberal lines.

With St Petersburg gripped in a scene of general chaos, these groups began to plot an uprising, and when Nicholas finally agreed to become emperor and was proclaimed Tsar Nicholas I, they made their move. When asked to swear an oath of allegiance to the new emperor, the conspirators refused and instead took up arms against the Tsar.

They made their stand on the morning of 26 December, as a group of officers led 3000 soldiers from the Moscow Regiment (alongside Grenadier and Naval Guards) to Senate Square in the centre of St Petersburg, where they assembled alongside the looming bronze statue of Peter the Great that sits at the heart of the square.

The soldiers refused to swear allegiance to Nicholas I and instead proclaimed their support for Konstantin. But their demands went much deeper than mere royal succession, with the revolutionaries declaring an end to autocracy in Russia and calling for the establishment of a constitutional monarchy or even a republic. The rebels even went so far as to demand the abolition of serfdom and proclaim equality among men, although some of these demands were hidden from the public due to fears that their true aims would spark a wider revolt and violence.

The revolution did not exactly start as planned. Its leader, Prince Sergei Trubetskoy, failed to show up and promptly abandoned the revolution, fleeing to the house of the Austrian Ambassador (who was also his brother-in-law). When his second-in-command left the square and failed to reappear, the revolution appeared to be quickly devolving into chaos. Although an interim chief of staff, Prince Eugene Obolensky, was finally appointed to lead the rebels, this inaction had allowed the soldiers loyal to Nicholas to surround the square.

For the next few hours, 3000 rebels and 9000 soldiers supporting the Tsar were locked in a standoff, with civilians flocking to the square and fraternising with the rebels. After several hours had passed, Nicholas sent one of his generals, Mikhail Miloradovich, to negotiate with the rebels, where he asked them to end the revolt. As General Miloradovich gave a public address to the crowd, he was shot and killed by Pyotr Kakhovsky, one of the leaders of the movement. The two armies were now at an impasse and a violent clash seemed inevitable.

With negotiations failing spectacularly and his patience wearing thin, Nicholas ordered his troops to crush the rebellion by force, who opened fire at the rebels with artillery. The ensuing violence would disperse the soldiers stationed in the square, with many fleeing on to the frozen Neva river, where further artillery fire would break the ice and send the fleeing rebels crashing into the icy waters below. The Decembrist Revolt was over, and the Tsar held on to his throne through force, killing as many as 1200 of the revolutionaries in the clash. In the coming days and weeks, many of the leaders of the revolt were rounded up in the Winter Palace, where they were tried and sentenced.

A number of the leading figures, such as the poet Kondraty Ryleev and Pyotr Kakhovsky, were executed for the role they played, while a number of others were condemned to exile in the far east – including Prince Eugene Obolensky and Prince Sergei Trubetskoy, who was stripped of his titles and sentenced to work in a coal mine. Several of the conspirators’ wives chose to follow their husbands into exile and share their fate, becoming known as dekabristki due to their loyalty.

The road from Napoleonic France to the massacre on Senate Square was a decade in the making, but the ideas that many of the officer class were exposed to in the West would directly inspire the actions of the Decembrists on that December morning. The Decembrist Revolt would also mark the first of a long series of challenges against Tsarist autocracy in support of liberal values, with exposure to the West shaking the foundations of Russia’s political system. The Decembrists failed to achieve their goal of instituting a constitutional monarchy in Russia, but the clash of ideas that they championed and the cultural transmission that they experienced would continue to shape the course of Russian history.

Politically speaking, National Populism will define the present era of global politics. From Donald Trump’s recent victory in the US Election to the ascendancy of populists in much of Europe, including Viktor Orban in Hungary, the AfD in Germany, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and the Freedom Party (FPÖ) in Austria, National Populism is on the march.

National Populism is also one of the most misunderstood political forces in modern history. The study of right-wing populism is almost entirely undertaken by groups or individuals actively hostile to the phenomenon. National Populist movements are inherently portrayed as “threats to democracy” or disruptors of the current order, which may or may not be true, but it also leaves the interpretation of these movements open to lazy stereotypes and cheap mischaracterisations.

Simply dismissing these movements as racist or nativist may give some commentators a sense of moral superiority, but it also does little to further our understanding of what is driving National Populism. To truly understand how National Populist movements are shaping the democratic world today, a more critical look at their origins, beliefs and ideology must be undertaken.

Origins

National Populist movements vary in form from country to country, but all share a common set of ideals. National Populism combines traditional right-wing political rhetoric about national identity with anti-elitist sentiments, sharing a fierce opposition to mass immigration and a strong dose of Euroscepticism (among its European supporters at least). At its heart, National Populists present themselves as representing the common people, in contrast to the traditional elites that control liberal democracies.

The earliest examples of National Populist movements come from 19th century Europe and the US. The People’s Party in America was an agrarian party founded in the 1890s to represent ‘the common people’ against financial elites, whilst the French Action Française party was created in 1899 as a monarchist and nationalist movement.

But to understand National Populism as an ideology, we must go back even further to seventeenth-century Europe. By the middle of the century, Europe was ravaged by the Thirty Years’ War - a civil war within the Holy Roman Empire. The Peace of Westphalia, signed in 1648, brought the war to an end after years of bloody conflict and 8 million deaths. The war had vital implications for the balance of geopolitical power in Western Europe, with the peace settlement conferring the right of princes in the Holy Roman Empire to determine the religion of their state, free from outside interference.

Subscribe now

The religious quarrels of seventeenth-century Europe may seem distant from the recent political gains made by Trump or other populists, but the Peace of Westphalia outlined the same issue that populist parties’ campaign on today – national sovereignty. Whilst National Populists in the twenty first century are clearly not fighting campaigns on religious grounds, the concept of national sovereignty outlined in the Westphalian Settlement is the driving force of National Populism across the western world.

Today, national sovereignty is often missing from accounts of National Populism’s rise, with one-dimensional explanations preferred. The 2008 financial crisis, a backlash against immigration by ‘old white men’ and ‘male rage’ have all been forwarded as explanations for the rise of Donald Trump and Brexit. Furthermore, it is often suggested by their critics that National Populists lack any coherent set of beliefs or ideals, simply channelling rage for their own political gain.

But by taking a dismissive view of their opponents, critics of National Populism fail to truly understand its vitality. According to political scientist Matthew Goodwin, National Populism draws its support from four key societal shifts, with each factor linking back to the idea that national sovereignty is under threat.

Beliefs

The first of the four shifts outlined by Goodwin is political distrust. Far from simply being an outlet for rage, National Populism feeds on the distrust voters have for their political institutions. Populist figures such as Donald Trump or Marine Le Pen are able to take advantage of political systems that often represent only a small portion of the electorate, such as a perceived bias towards urban-dwelling university graduates in many western countries.

Despite 33.8% of British adults and 53.7% of working-age Americans holding a university degree, their cultural and economic prevalence leads to a growing population of non-university-educated voters in both countries who feel excluded from the political system. It is this sense of distrust that leaves this demographic open to backing National Populist candidates against mainstream politicians.

The second major shift that Goodwin has identified is destruction. From the US to Europe, unprecedented rates of immigration have led to very real fears within electorates that national cultures, identities and values are being undermined. The enormous wave of immigration seen in the western world over the last 30 years and the failure of mainstream politicians to address concerns over assimilation have resulted in a backlash against political institutions, which again benefits National Populists.

Thirdly is deprivation, with economic insecurity and rising deprivation in many western nations driving a deep fear of economic decline. In particular, the loss of manufacturing bases in practically all western countries as a result of globalisation has convinced large portions of the electorate that traditional political elites no longer have their economic interests in mind, which provides fertile ground for populist movements.

Finally, Goodwin points to the impact of dealignment in the western world. Put simply, dealignment describes the breakdown of traditional political bonds and voting patterns – and especially the movement of blue-collar workers from left-wing to right-wing parties. For example, see the failure of the British Labour Party to win votes in its traditional ‘Red Wall’ in 2019 or the loss of blue-collar workers in states like Pennsylvania and Ohio by the Democrats in recent elections.

This realignment provides opportunities for National Populists to form new coalitions and attract voters who, in the middle of the twentieth century, would likely have voted along traditional class lines.

Underpinning all of these shifts are fears around national sovereignty. Faced with globalisation, mass immigration and structural economic shifts, voters in western countries are increasingly seeing National Populists as the bulwark against this assault on national sovereignty. Make America Great Again may be a punchy campaign slogan, but it also speaks to those who feel that traditional elites are unable or unwilling to address the issues of the day, leaving global economic and social forces to run amok. Similar jibes against the European Union by Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom in the Netherlands hit the same tone of restoring national sovereignty.

National Populism is certainly not a new phenomenon, and lessons can be learned from history. The People’s Party, an agrarian populist party, emerged in the United States in the early 1890s. Likewise, the America First Committee, established in September 1940 with the goal of opposing American entry into the Second World War, shows how such movements have a deep root in democratic politics.

However, it is crucial that political elites in the west understand the factors driving the popularity of National Populist movements, as to dismiss whole sections of the electorate as beyond redemption is a clear path to political disaster. Mainstream politicians who fail to learn this lesson do so at their own peril.

The Roman Republic was undoubtedly one of the most extraordinary civilisations in human history. From the earliest days of the Republic to its descent into a bloody civil war and eventual collapse, it has provided the foundations of Western civilisation that we cherish today. The Republic’s sophisticated legal system, technological innovations and form of constitutional government still serve as the cornerstone of modern society. Likewise, its political heroes like Caesar and Cicero continue to live long in popular culture.

For all the triumphs of the Roman Republic, its political system was the greatest legacy it left for future generations. Both the American Revolution and the French Revolution took inspiration from the Roman Republic, seeing it as a model for a society governed not by kings and monarchs, but by the people. It is no surprise that when James Madison, John Jay and Alexander Hamilton wrote the Federalist Papers in defence of the United States Constitution (1787-1788), they did so under the pseudonym ‘Publius’ – a reference to Publius Valerius Poplicola, one of the founders and first consuls of Rome.

From examining the political system of the Roman Republic, which elected its own citizens to sit in its Senate and annually elected its own leaders in the form of consuls, it is not difficult to see how the Roman world has shaped our own democratic institutions. But the Republic did not have a perfect system of governance and was plagued by many of the ills present within our own societies.

The Roman Republic may have been relatively democratic, but it was also an essentially aristocratic system – controlled by a tight group of nobiles who used their wealth, prestige and control of the electoral system to entrench their own power. The Republic may have had fiercely contested elections, but these were closed competitions between a small group of Rome’s wealthiest families.

Key to political success in Rome was the institution of patronage, which worked as a political tool to ensure social stability, ensuring that this elite was at least somewhat attuned to the needs and demands of the average Roman citizen. The patronage system worked in a transactional manner. A patroni was a member of the senatorial class, usually holding either political power, wealth or often both. He would support his cliens through a variety of means: defending them in the law courts, providing them with loans on favourable terms, or simply supporting political causes on their behalf.

In return, the patron would receive the political allegiance of his client, who would support him at the ballot box and on the campaign trail. Thus, political support was regularly secured through direct relationships between the candidate and their supporters. The grand houses of the nobility on the expensive Palatine Hill could often be filled with clients, looking for assistance and waiting for an opportunity to speak to their patron.

This form of patronage politics was transactional, but it also worked. Despite a system of aristocratic dominance, the Romans believed that patronage maintained social harmony and order, creating a bond between the political elite and the people. As historian Erich Gruen notes, even in the final years of the Republic, “the nobility continued to think in terms of compacts cemented by personal or familial alliance.”

These links of patronage existed not only between the mighty and the meek (such as freedmen or plebians) but also among aristocratic families themselves. Political parties in the modern sense had no place in Roman politics, with political factions shifting based on patronage. These personal and familial links would decide senatorial debates, criminal prosecutions and military commands among the Roman elite.

Patronage was a core element of Roman politics, and even the grandest figures of the Roman Republic had to play the game. As Gruen points out, whereas “Caesar won a reputation by espousing popular causes, but he did not lack associations within the nobility”, Marcus Licinius Crassus, one of the wealthiest men in Rome, “preferred to accumulate power without cooperating with the leading nobiles”, but instead used his wealth to establish a vast network of clients. Even Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (Pompey the Great) – a commander highly regarded for his military successes – had to secure the support of leading aristocratic families to achieve political success. Although these examples are from the Republic’s last generation, the same theme can be found throughout its 500 year history.

Ancient Rome is certainly not the only society in which patronage has played an important role in politics, with all societies (both ancient and modern) to some extent seeing the same system of patrons and clients play out. But the extent to which patronage dominated Roman society and enabled social cohesion marks the Roman Republic out as unique. Even the final years of the republic, where a wider range of individuals were engaged in politics without ties to established patrons, saw politicians scramble to secure the support of their fellow citizens though personal bonds.

The Roman elite may have almost exclusively arisen from aristocratic families, but they certainly had to work for their political support. This was not only for the benefit of their clients, who had an outlet for political grievances to be addressed by the ruling class, but also for the stability of Roman society.

Over the last two centuries, very few thinkers have done more to shape the modern world than Edmund Burke. Known today as the “father of modern conservatism”, Burke is remembered as a staunch defender of tradition and a fierce critic of the French Revolution – with the liberal historian Lord Acton naming him as one of the three greatest liberal figures in British history, alongside Macaulay and Gladstone. 

Burke himself had a varied career: having served in Parliament between 1765-1794, he took a keen interest in British misrule in India and was a critic of the British government in the American colonies, where he sympathised with the American aspiration for self-government. But it is his philosophical, rather than Parliamentarian, contributions that he is revered for today.

A sceptic of centralised power, rampant individualism and oppressive government, Burke championed an enlightened conservatism that revered tradition and hierarchy, and opposed radical change. His Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), which opposed the revolutionary urge to tear down institutions and uproot traditional social structures, would leave an indelible mark on the future direction of conservative thought throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

It was in Reflections that Burke introduced the phrase ‘little platoon’, which would come to be one of the defining phrases of his vision for conservatism – and an idea that resonates today perhaps even more so than in the fraught atmosphere of revolutionary France. Against the backdrop of rapid globalisation and the realignment of politics in much of the Western world, Burke’s little platoons are an important reminder of the political forces that shape our world today.

In Reflections, Burke uses the term ‘little platoon’ to describe the betrayal of social hierarchy during the French Revolution by some members of the aristocratic class, but it can also represent the various local, small and community associations that form throughout an individual’s life.

First and foremost was the family, which Burke viewed as the cornerstone of a healthy and functioning society. But the little platoons of Burke’s world could be broadened to incorporate a variety of civic groups that play a role in a person’s life – such as their neighbourhood, church, charities or even local businesses.

Burke believed these institutions were crucial in providing a sense of stability and social order in society, offering collections of individuals a sense of rootedness within their immediate community. To Burke, it was this need to be ‘rooted’ that would create the level of social harmony needed for a prospering, stable country – avoiding social disharmony and violent revolution.

Burke’s little platoons also represent his scepticism of centralised, top-down power. Burke rejected the need for a strong centralising bureaucracy that could impose values on citizens from above, instead preferring an approach where power is redistributed to local structures and oppressive government avoided.   

But in Burke’s vision, the little platoons also served as a check on the type of rampant individualism that can leave citizens unmoored from all responsibility. The sense of belonging fostered through family and local community would offer a moral grounding, maintaining a high level of social cohesion and avoiding political isolation and alienation.

Politically speaking, Burke considered the little platoons as crucial bulwarks against social upheaval and radical change, believing that these local institutions would instead preserve a sense of deference to tradition. This support of gradual, measured progress in opposition to rapid upheaval would mark Burke’s vision of the world and define his contribution to conservative thought.  

Burke’s vision of society and history was not only theoretical, but also practical. Born in Ireland to a Catholic mother and Protestant father, he saw first-hand the effects of arbitrary power, with 18th century Europe littered with a variety of more or less despotic rulers. This opposition to arbitrary power would inform his support for the American colonists, where he denounced British taxation policies and warned that without their revolution, “the Americans could have no sort of security for their laws or liberties, or for any part of them; and, that the very circumstance of our freedom would have augmented the weight of their slavery.”

Likewise, his criticism of the East India Company’s misrule in India was aimed not just at their cruelty and mismanagement, but also the company’s disregard for the traditions of the natives – which culminated in his attempt to impeach Warren Hastings, the Governor-General of Bengal (1773-1785), who was eventually acquitted after the longest impeachment proceeding in parliamentary history.

In today’s highly globalised world, Burke’s little platoons offer a vision for the future that builds upon the past. To Burke, society was not simply a collection of self-interested individuals pursuing their own economic interests, but “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” Institutions that defend traditional ways of life are to be championed, not destroyed.

As the West becomes more interconnected but increasingly rootless, with mass-immigration and a globalised economy breaking down national cultures and leaving local populations increasingly restless, Burke’s call for tradition and localism seems more relevant than ever. The little platoons may be small, but they certainly have a big role to play in the modern world.

In July 1957, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan stood before a group of fellow Conservatives and delivered one of the most remarkable speeches in British history. Macmillan had not long been in office and the location, the quiet market town of Bedford, provided an unlikely backdrop for such a momentous occasion. It is not the speech itself which is remembered in the history books, but one specific passage. Macmillan told his audience:

Let us be frank about it. Most of our people have never had it so good. Go around the country, go to the industrial towns, go to the farms and you will see a state of prosperity such as we have never had in my lifetime, nor indeed in the history of this country.   

Macmillan’s words have captured the imaginations of historians and journalists for one reason: they summed up the prevailing mood of the time. The spirit Macmillan expressed in those now famous lines was that of the Golden Age of Capitalism, a period between 1945 and the early 1970s in which the capitalist Western world experienced an unprecedented spell of economic prosperity and wealth creation.

The Golden Age has shaped the course of twentieth century history and defined the modern world, with its rise, decline and fall having a profound impact on our lives today. To understand the Golden Age of Capitalism, we must trace its roots, features and implications – before exploring why it came crashing down in the 1970s.

Rising from the ruins

The world of 1945 was a world defined by insecurity and a precarious sense of the future.  The Second World War killed between 50-75 million people and left 40 million more displaced, with entire societies, economies and civilisations reduced to smouldering ruins. The consequences of the war were not felt equally: whilst the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China and Japan were severely damaged by the war, the United States had increased its gross national product by two thirds and, by the end of the war, its industrial capacity represented two thirds of the global total.  

For the West, rebuilding after the war had both economic and ideological considerations to contend with. In his landmark study of the short twentieth century, The Age of Extremes, historian Eric Hobsbawm points out that “in the non-communist states recovery also meant putting the fear of social revolution and communist advance, heritage of war and resistance, behind them”, ensuring that the instability of 1914-1945 would not be repeated.

The experience of two world wars, mass social unrest, the Great Depression and communist revolutions in Russia and elsewhere had left elites in the West deeply fearful of further discontent – and the masses were equally eager for change.

In the West, the post-1945 period was marked by a number of common characteristics: a strong and sustained level of economic growth, low unemployment, rising wages and rapid technological advancement. It would require a complete overhaul of the relationship between the state and the economy and, underpinning it all, was the development of a new social contract between the elites and the people.

From warfare to welfare

As the Second World War drew to a close, a period of optimism gave way to fears of economic troubles. Many observers believed that far from ensuring the future security and prosperity of the liberal capitalist world, the Allies’ victorious triumph would bring about grave challenges to its future. Memories of the 1920s, which saw parts of Europe beset by hyperinflation and then the onset of the Great Depression, starting in the United States but quickly reverberating around the world, would live long in the minds of Western elites.

Likewise, in most of Europe, communists found themselves in a much stronger position in 1945 than they had been in prior to the war. As the face of much (although not all) of the resistance to Nazi rule in occupied Europe, communist parties benefited from a political boost in the immediate post-war years.

The post-war consensus that the Golden Age was built upon may well have been driven by fear of revolution, but its economic and social policies would usher in a period of extraordinary prosperity. The first pillar of the Golden Age was economic stability. The Marshall Plan, enacted in 1948 under President Truman, would provide over $13 billion in economic aid to countries in Western Europe. The importance of restoring economic stability to a ravaged Europe was underlined by Ernest Bevin, Britain’s Foreign Secretary:

"When the Marshall Plan proposals were announced, I grabbed them with both hands. I felt that it was the first chance we had ever been given since the end of the war to look at [the] European economy as a whole."

International trade and cooperation were also strengthened during the Golden Age, bolstering global trade. The establishment of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund as part of the Bretton Woods System (1944) was championed by economist John Maynard Keynes as a way of providing credit to nations and preventing a return to the economically unstable inter-war years.

The establishment of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency, by pegging its value to gold at a price of $35 per ounce and enabling member states to peg their currencies to the dollar, was also a core element of Bretton Woods - acting as both another boost to global trade and a stabilising mechanism in the international economy.

In Europe, the founding of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951, which would later become the European Economic Community (1957) and finally the European Union (1993) would follow a similar logic, binding the economies of Western Europe together and enabling the movement of goods, services and labour across member states.  In short, in both the US and Europe, steps were taken to support international trade and prevent a return to the protectionist policies of the inter-war years.

Keynesian economics would also be crucial to the next pillar of the Golden Age – the establishment of the welfare state. The post-1945 Western world was dominated by the growing role of the state in providing economic, employment and healthcare services. In Britain, the Beveridge Report (1942), produced by economist William Beveridge, would proceed a number of welfare measures in the post-war era, including:

1. National Assistance Act (1948) – which required local authorities to provide welfare provisions such as accommodation or grants to the old, infirm and disabled.

2. National Insurance Act (1948) – which provided basic social security for all Britons, regardless of whether they were paying national insurance contributions.

3. Education Act (1944) – which provided secondary education for all children.

4. National Health Service Act (1946) – which established the National Health Service as a free and universal healthcare system.

Most of this legislation was introduced under the Labour Attlee Government (1945-1951), but other countries across the West also passed similar measures over the next few years – introducing unemployment and sickness benefits, expanding the state pension system and establishing new social care services. In the US, the expansion of Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s and the ‘War on Poverty’ under President Lyndon B. Johnson would address similar challenges.

The nationalisation of key industries in many Western states, such as railways, mines and steelworks, would further expand this trend of state intervention in the economy, with public funds being used to stimulate economic activity and prevent the emergence of mass unemployment. To Western elites, the lesson of the inter-war years was clear: no return could be made to mass unemployment and unrestrained free markets, even if it meant a permanent extension of the state.

The end of the Golden Age

The Golden Age of Capitalism would bring about an unprecedented spell of economic growth, rising wages and general prosperity across the Western world, with Hobsbawm characterising the period as follows: “essentially it was a sort of marriage between economic liberalism and social democracy”, in which the old pre-war system was reformed out of all recognition and the “old believers”, who continued to champion laissez-faire economics, were almost entirely frozen out of the discussion.

However, this system did not last indefinitely. Economic pressure had already resulted in President Richard Nixon suspending the dollar’s convertibility into gold in 1971, which in effect ended the Bretton Woods system.

The 1973 Oil Crisis, which saw oil embargoes placed upon Western nations by OPEC and cuts to oil production, led to soaring inflation and economic hardship for a US economy dependent on foreign oil imports. As global growth slowed, many of the costly welfare and industrial policies undertaken in the West quickly became a burden on their respective states.

In 1976, Britain even required a loan from the IMF to keep afloat, which came at the cost of ending many of the social programmes that successive governments had championed as part of the post-war consensus. The elections of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and Ronald Reagan in 1980 would well and truly bring the Golden Age to an end and usher in a new era of neoliberalism, characterised by a shrinking of the state, reduction in the power of labour unions, rapid deregulation and the privatisation of key industries.

The legacy of the Golden Age is deep, and despite decades of neoliberalism, this period has dramatically reshaped our societies today. Even in light of the post-1979 reforms undertaken in most Western states, the state in capitalist countries is still far larger today than its pre-1939 form and extends to areas of society previously not envisioned prior to the war.

Consumer culture also expanded enormously during the Golden Age, with spending on leisure and household activities soaring as wealth levels grew and wages boomed. Likewise, technological progress was rapid, funded both directly by the state and through this growing consumer market.

But perhaps the most significant implication for the West was the supercharged period of globalisation that would follow the Golden Age’s collapse. The progress made in integrating national economies into a single global market was multiplied post-1979, with politicians like Margaret Thatcher and later Tony Blair seeing the advancement of globalisation as a core pillar of their economic model.

In our own age, globalisation has generated vast amounts of wealth and profit, but also destabilised many Western nations – destroying their traditional manufacturing bases and exporting previously well-paid jobs abroad.  The Golden Age of Capitalism marks a sharp contrast with the period of neoliberalism that would follow, with an age of growth and prosperity giving way to a prolonged spell of uncertainty.

As the UK went to the polls last week and elected a new government, much has been made about the size of the Labour Party’s victory on Thursday. With Keir Starmer’s party winning a 174-seat majority in the House of Commons, the fourth-largest in British history, talk of a supermajority has been a regular feature of the media commentary. Whilst a supermajority – a term borrowed from US politics – has no constitutional role in British parliamentary politics (with a simple majority of 326 seats necessary to form a majority government or pass legislation), the size of Labour’s victory is historic.

But by comparison, the 1931 General Election makes Thursday’s victory look like a close race. That election, which produced a majority of 492 for the National Government of Ramsay MacDonald, was filled with drama, disorder and the dissolution of the pre-1930s political order. To understand what brought about this result, we must first understand the political environment of the period – starting with the Great Depression of 1929.   

Subscribe now

The global economic turmoil caused by the Great Depression had a profound impact on Britain, with the country plagued by mass unemployment, economic hardship and soaring poverty. Economic concerns dominated the party manifestos of the 1929 General Election, which brought the Labour Party – led by Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald – to power in a minority government, with Labour pledging to tackle the economic crisis through social welfare spending and public infrastructure works.

Under MacDonald’s government, the economic crisis deepened over the next few years, with the unemployment rate soaring to over 20% by 1931. The government’s failure to restore economic stability and bring unemployment under control led to a split in the Labour Party, with two factions emerging.

MacDonald and his Chancellor, Philip Snowden, both believed that spending cuts and tax increases were necessary to balance the budget – in essence, economic orthodoxy. On the other hand, many left-wing and trade union-aligned members of the Labour Party strongly opposed these cuts and favoured continued state intervention to protect those most vulnerable to the economic carnage.

A report by an economic committee led by Sir George May, a prominent city businessman, in Summer 1931 warned that Britain faced a £120 million gap in its public finances – which only strengthened the calls for austerity.

Facing a rebellion in his own party and a minority in Parliament, with Labour relying on support from David Lloyd George’s Liberals to pass legislation, MacDonald began looking for support elsewhere and met leading Conservative figures Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain. Following intense discussions, in August 1931 MacDonald took the radical step of forming a National Government to carry out his austerity policies, which included members of the Conservatives and Liberals.

MacDonald’s own party saw this move as a betrayal of core Labour values, expelling him and his supporters from the party. The former leader of the Labour Party and the first ever Labour prime minister was now alienated from his former allies and left leading a government pieced together with his previous opponents.

From austerity to election

With MacDonald and Snowden now under the newly formed National Labour Organisation (from which they led the National Government), they looked ahead to instituting their economic policies – albeit aware that a fresh mandate was required. With the National Government now dominated by Conservatives and facing fierce opposition from the Labour Party, MacDonald soon called a general election and hoped the British public would back his plan for economic stability.

The 1931 General Election was dominated by the economy, with all major parties putting their solution to the Great Depression front and centre of the campaign. Whilst the National Government made their case for austerity and spending cuts, the Labour Party, now led by Arthur Henderson, argued for continued welfare spending.

But Henderson and the Labour Party were facing an uphill struggle. Their failure to tackle the economic situation post-1929 and the defection of their former leader put them in a tight position, with their chances of victory looking slim.

The British public went to the ballot box on 27 October 1931 and the result was a landslide victory for the National Government. Stanley Baldwin’s Conservatives won 470 seats, with the National Government as a whole taking 554 out of 615 seats. Meanwhile, the Labour Party were completely wiped out – losing 80% of their seats and becoming the official opposition with only 52 MPs. MacDonald would remain as prime minister and lead the National Government into a new Parliament, albeit under a coalition controlled by the Conservatives. The Liberals also struggled, with the party splintering into three competing factions.

The scale of this electoral victory would reflect strong public support for the National Government’s austerity policies and provide them with a mandate to push ahead with their economic vision, but it would also have a long-term impact on British politics. The 1931 General Election would signify a period of extended Conservative political dominance, lasting until 1945, and within a few years usher in Neville Chamberlain to Downing Street and Britain’s policy of appeasement.

Likewise, it would also leave the Labour Party and the Liberals stranded in the political wilderness. The Labour Party would spend a generation in opposition before getting an opportunity to lead the country again – giving the party the chance to unify around a common cause of welfare intervention and an internationalist foreign policy. This would be crucial for the post-1945 era, when the Labour Party would again return to Downing Street.

For the Liberals, the result was equally devastating, leaving the party split between the pro-free trade ‘classic liberals’ and those who accepted a need for government intervention in the economy. The Liberals, who were increasingly seen as irrelevant in the years before 1931, had now seemingly lost all their political influence.

The supermajority of 1931 would significantly shape the future of British politics, entrenching the Conservatives in power until the end of the Second World War. It would also decide the economic approach Britain was to take towards the Great Depression in the years to come, with prolonged and continued economic troubles shaping the post-war development of the welfare state that was to follow.

It is perhaps too early to tell whether the 2024 General Election will have such a striking impact on the balance of political power today. But if the 1931 General Election is anything to go by, such an enormous victory may well shift the political landscape in unexpected ways.  

Disorder has been at the heart of President Trump’s chaotic political career ever since he first announced his electoral ambitions, and for good reason. Trump has repeatedly positioned himself as the candidate that can restore order to a fractured, broken and disordered nation, tying together fears of crime, lawlessness and societal chaos as a central part of his message.

The most memorable part of Trump’s 2017 inauguration speech was his vow that “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now” – a line which reverberated around the coverage of the day in both national and international media. With growing polarisation over campus protests across the US, Trump has quickly seized upon the opportunity to present himself as the sole candidate that can restore order.

Subscribe now

The concept of law and order is nothing new to democratic politics, and its influence expands much further than Donald Trump. In the UK, both the Conservative and Labour parties have attacked each other over their record on law and order, with it likely that both major parties will pledge to toughen sentences for criminals and fund more policing as part of their election manifestos. Likewise, across Europe, North and South America, Africa and beyond, fears of lawlessness have consistently polled as a top concern among electorates – alongside major challenges such as the economy, healthcare and national security.

History teaches us that law and order can play a crucial role in democratic politics, providing ammunition in fiercely fought election campaigns and a rallying cry for political support. By examining two different political events – Richard Nixon’s 1968 campaign for the White House, and Pompey the Great’s push to restore order to the late Roman Republic – we can get a glimpse into how disorder can decide key political moments.

Nixon, disorder and Vietnam

On the day of the 1968 Presidential Election, both the Republican nominee, Richard Nixon, and the Democratic candidate, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, could sense that the winning margin would be tight. Both Nixon and Humphrey had fought a tumultuous campaign in which public disobedience – both civil and uncivil – had become commonplace across parts of the United States. In 1968, the US found itself in a pre-revolutionary atmosphere, with race riots and anti-war protests dominating the headlines.

Urban race riots had become a common occurrence in major cities since the mid-1960s, spurred by clashes over civil rights and racial discrimination. Following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr in April 1968, race riots broke out on a fierce scale in cities such as Washington D.C., Chicago, Baltimore and Kansas City, in which looting, arson and clashes with police were commonplace. In the 10 days following King’s assassination, over 200 cities saw rioting, with 43 people killed, over 27,000 arrested and millions of dollars’ worth of property destroyed.

Race riots were not the only source of disorder during the 1968 campaign. The Vietnam War, as both the scale of the war and American casualties grew, had seen strong opposition from student groups and become another central issue of the campaign – with students regularly taking over university buildings in protest against the war. The culmination of this anti-war fervour was the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, in which Humphrey was formerly named as the Democratic nominee. 10,000 anti-war protesters descended on the convention, which in turn was met with force by 23,000 police officers and members of the National Guards. Disorder broke out both inside and outside the convention, with the event overshadowed by chaos.

To a crafty politician like Nixon, this was the political opportunity of a lifetime. Nixon’s message to the American public was simple – he positioned the election as a choice between disorder, rioting and chaos with the Democrats, or law and stability under a Nixon presidency. Nixon declared that growing violence “is the work of other Americans, transformed into a mob” and that “the spirit of vandalism” had become commonplace on university campuses.

Nixon pledged to bring an end to the disorder and contrasted his strong law and order message against that of the Democrats, presenting the silent majority as being “sick of what has been allowed to go on in this nation for too long.”

Time and again, the theme of law and order permeated throughout the 1968 campaign, with further events – such as the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy, and the candidacy of independent George Wallace, a brash populist and fierce opponent of desegregation – further underscoring the deep fault lines that ran through the nation. But in the end, Nixon’s pledge to end the disorder won the day – and he was elected president by 301 electoral votes to Humphrey’s 191. Law and order proved to be a vote winner.

Pompey, Cicero and disorder in Rome

Nixon’s 1968 victory may have been a turning point in US politics, but the history of the late Roman Republic highlights that law and order politics have deep roots. In 52 BC, Roman society was also beset by street violence and a deep sense of disorder. The chaotic events of 52 were tied to the rise of Publius Clodius Pulcher, a populist politician with a chequered past marked by scandal. A few years prior, in 58, Clodius was elected as tribune and used the position to attack members of Rome’s political establishment - targeting Marcus Tullius Cicero, Rome’s greatest orator and a former consul.

Clodius used Cicero’s time as consul (the top political position in Rome) as ammunition against him. Previously, in December 63, Cicero had stopped a plot to overthrow the government and assassinate the senate by a disgruntled politician called Catiline, and promptly put Catiline’s supporters to death for their role in the plot.

The moment marked the crowning glory of Cicero’s consulship, but five years later it would come back to haunt him. Clodius enacted laws to prevent the execution of Roman citizens without a trial and brought charges against Cicero, retrospectively, for his actions as consul. Cicero argued that the law was ad hominem and targeted personally towards him, which was illegal under Roman law. But Clodius gathered his rowdy supporters onto the streets and ordered them to intimidate anyone that sided with Cicero – forcing the former consul into exile.

Clodius had won an enormous victory against Cicero and the establishment. After triumphantly having Cicero’s house on the Palatine Hill destroyed and a temple dedicated to Liberty erected in its place, he would then forge an alliance with Gaius Julius Caesar and continue his campaign against the Optimates – the conservative faction in the senate, led by politicians such as Marcus Porcius Cato. But the mob tactics used by Clodius made him deeply unpopular with the establishment, who opted to use his own strategy against him.

The fightback against Clodius and his mob was led by Pompey the Great, a former consul and distinguished general who pushed for an end to the violence and Cicero’s return to Rome. Clodius and his mob once again took to the streets and violence ensued, with Cicero’s own brother, Quintus, almost losing his life. It was at this point that Pompey realised he had to use the forces of Clodius against him, promising to restore law and order to the streets of Rome by brute strength.

The conservatives found their own firebrand, Titus Annius Milo, who was able to call his mob onto the streets and push the supporters of Clodius out of the forum. Cicero’s recall was then put to a vote, with the historian Plutarch remarking: “it is said that the people never passed any vote with such unanimity.” Pompey and Milo had managed to restore order and save Cicero, but further violence was yet to come.

The next flareup would arise in 53, when Milo announced his candidacy for the consulship. Street battles between the gangs of Clodius and Milo were a running theme of the campaign, with the situation becoming so volatile that the elections had to be postponed. On 18 January 52, Clodius and Milo would encounter each other by chance outside of the city – and fighting once again broke out. This time, Clodius was fatally injured in the violence and his supporters back in Rome marched into the forum. The Greek historian Appian recounts the disorder that followed:

“There the most reckless ones collected the benches and chairs of the senators and made a funeral pyre for him, which they lighted and from which the senate-house and many buildings in the neighbourhood caught fire and were consumed along with the corpse of Clodius.”

With the violence reaching a tipping point, Pompey once again saw an opportunity to become the voice of law and order. The senate passed a Senatus Consultum Ultimum – a declaration of emergency – which enabled Pompey to raise troops and restore order in the city.

The senate then cancelled the elections for the year and took the unprecedented move of granting Pompey a sole consulship, allowing him to use his troops to oversee the prosecution of Milo and bring an end to mob rule in Rome. Order was restored – and Pompey had gained a political victory by positioning himself as the politician of law and order.

These two examples, from Washington D.C. to Ancient Rome, are both set against the backdrop of highly different social, political and cultural environments, with over 2000 years separating Nixon from Pompey the Great. But the lesson of both is the role that disorder can play in democratic politics, and the way in which crafty politicians can use popular fear of disorder to their political advantage.

From the forum to the White House, it is certain that the 2024 US election will see a similar move by Donald Trump to present himself as the ‘defender of order’. Only time will tell whether this move will pay off politically, but history informs us that it may well prove fruitful.

On arriving in Bratislava, the capital city of Slovakia, it is practically impossible to miss the imposing figure of Bratislava Castle. Towering high above the urban metropolis below, the baroque castle serves as a potent symbol of both the city and the Slovak nation, featuring on everything from the Slovakian Euro notes to an endless stream of branding and marketing materials.

This is for a good reason. The castle, rectangular shaped with four corner towers and glistening in dazzling white paint, impresses with its beauty – and provides an enduring reminder of the city’s history. From the Romans to the Moravians, to its time as a fortification of the Hungarian kingdom and later an outpost of the grand Austro-Hungarian Empire, Bratislava Castle prompts us to consider the great empires that have controlled the city over the years.

However, its more recent history also provides a crucial insight into the modern history of Slovakia, alongside offering an important lesson about the nature of totalitarian regimes.

Rise and fall

The castle itself has a tumultuous history. Ruins within the castle grounds date back to the Roman Empire, when the Danube River became the natural border of the empire in the first century BC. The fortress that sat upon on the site would later feature in the first written record of Bratislava, the Annals of Salzburg (907 AD) in connection with a battle fought between the Hungarians and Bavarians in the region.

Throughout the Middle Ages, the fortress would be rebuilt, expanded and fortified, with a gothic castle eventually being constructed during the reign of Sigismund of Luxembourg. However, it would be in the Early Modern period that the castle began to take the form that we see today. An expanded gothic castle was constructed in the 16^th century, and in the 17^th century it was rebuilt in a baroque style.

Subscribe now

During the reign of Maria Theresa (Habsburg ruler between 1740-1780), the castle was again refashioned to suit the needs of her son-in-law, Albert of Saxony-Teschen, who, as royal governor of Hungary, used Bratislava Castle as his residence. A passionate art collector, Albert used the castle as a cultural sphere and to showcase his own collection. It was during this time that many of the castle’s iconic features, such as the white and gold grand staircase, were built – bringing a sense of Habsburg grandeur to what had once been a practical fortification on the Danube.

The rise of Bratislava Castle showcases the fortunes of the authorities who fought to control the region, but the castle’s fall was equally dramatic. As Bratislava’s importance in the Habsburg Empire lessened, the castle reverted to being a military barracks – with this decision having enormous consequences. On 28 May 1811, the castle was ravaged by a fire and engulfed in flames. Caused by the carelessness of a solider, the fire burned for three days and completed gutted the castle.

The ruins of Bratislava Castle would sit like a rotting corpse above the city, left untouched for nearly 150 years. In the 20^th century, plans were proposed to rebuild the castle or even demolish it completely and replace it with modern administrative buildings, but disagreements over the plans left the castle frozen in time, a shadow of its former self. But once communism arrived in the country, this would soon change.

Totalitarianism and restoration

At the end of the Second World War, Slovakia, which had been a one-party state governed by allies of Nazi Germany, was liberated by the Red Army in 1944-1945 – and found itself behind the Iron Curtain and now under the sway of the Soviet Union. The ruling communist party of the re-established Czechoslovakian state set to work rebuilding the country under their own doctrine, and the fate of Bratislava Castle once again resurfaced.

In 1953, the authorities allowed archaeological research to begin within the castle grounds, with the reconstruction of the castle then beginning in earnest. A number of notable figures were involved in the reconstruction, including the renowned Slovak painter Janko Alexy and architect Dušan Martinček, who worked on the castle between 1958 and 1976.

However, the most interesting – and tragic – figure involved in the restoration was Alfréd Piffl, a Czech architect and passionate preservationist. Piffl’s background was nothing short of impressive: after graduating from Czech Technical University in Prague and spending his early career designing posters in an advertising department, he soon found a new calling in preservation architecture, taking up a position in the State Archaeological Institute in Prague.

After a spell working on some of the most significant archaeological sites in Czechoslovakia, Piffl defended his doctoral thesis in 1937, before progressing after the Second World War to prestigious lecturing roles at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and his alma mater, Czech Technical University. During this time, he would organise a number of major exhibitions and protected important artwork from thieves in the immediate chaos of the post-war world.

In 1946, Piffl’s career reached new highs, as he became professor of the history of architecture at Slovak Technical University, where he would lead a newly founded institution, the Faculty of Architecture and Civil Engineering. It was this position that would take Piffl to Bratislava, setting the stage for a tumultuous contest between Piffl and the authorities over the castle.  

Between 1953 and 1957, Piffl devoted his life to faithfully restoring Bratislava Castle, where he painstakingly oversaw the reconstruction to ensure the historical features of the castle were accurately preserved. The task was gargantuan, as Piffl laid out in his diary: “It will take tremendous effort because we're starting from scratch”. His enthusiasm for the work was unmatched, with the professor proclaiming in one diary entry from 21 April 1954:

“So the work began! It is a huge nervous commitment, work for years. I don't know if I will be enough for it, but I feel a kind of ripple, the presence of unknown forces is driving me to work, and I believe that I will be able to finish it.”

However, the work took a heavy toll on Piffl. In another diary entry, he exclaimed:

“How many hours have I devoted to the castle! Like, merely studying the mortars, plasters and stones. All those Sundays that I devoted to the castle in discomfort and at the expense of my family. Hours and hours of study! But a communist primitive cannot see that!”

Despite his painstaking efforts, Piffl’s dream of restoring the castle would come crashing down as he fell foul of the authorities, who in 1957 imprisoned him for two years on charges of ‘public sedition and slandering a friendly power’. The true cause of his arrest is still unknown – rumours of a tunnel in the castle well through to neighbouring Austria was one such story, or another (perhaps more plausible) version of events suggests that Piffl had offended a local functionary who was visiting the castle well.

For Piffl, this marked the end of his work on Bratislava Castle. He was stripped of all his academic titles by the authorities, and after leaving prison in 1959 worked several menial jobs to make ends meet - including at a panel factory in Trnávka and later at a building office. 

Towards the end of his career, Piffl was able to return to archaeology, working on various important sites around Czechoslovakia (including the famous Devín Castle, outside of Bratislava). However, he would never again return to Bratislava Castle, with other architects like Martinček taking over his work and completing the restoration in the late 1960s. The castle now stands pride of place on the hilltop above Bratislava Old Town. On 25 June 1972 Piffl suffered a stroke, passing away the next day.

The dual fate of Bratislava Castle and Alfréd Piffl tells us a great deal about the regimes that controlled the nations behind the iron curtain, alongside the relationship between history and totalitarianism. For the castle, it is no coincidence that the communist regime opted to push ahead with the restoration – with its reconstruction blending the communist exploitation of the past with political objectives. To quote art historian Ján Bakoš in his study of the castle:

“As we know, communism systematically exploited the past and its remnants for its own purposes. Moreover, official art in the communist era, "socialist realism", was a specific kind of historical revival and as such mixed the past with the present to construe an ideal pretended reality. The attempt to mask the expansive, world-domineering nature of communist ideology and legitimise its hegemony forced the totalitarian regime to allow a certain degree of nationalism into the official ideology.”

If the reconstruction of the castle showcases the ‘world-domineering nature of communist ideology’, Piffl’s own fate shows the disdain of the regime towards individual liberty. A state driven by a fierce ideology left individuals - even those of great talent such as Piffl - at the whims of party functionaries, jealous officials and overzealous bureaucrats.

Without a fair trial and protection from the state, those seen as ideological enemies could be purged at will in the name of doctrine. The magnificent spectacle of Bratislava Castle today reminds us of the ways in which history can be transformed and refashioned – and the high price that some individuals would pay in defence of the traditional.

One of the few things that Julius Caesar and Donald Trump have in common is that both politicians faced no shortage of legal threats. Trump’s list of courtroom battles is well known. However, his disqualification from the Colorado and Maine ballots poses the most immediate challenge to his re-election prospects, with the political consequences of any Supreme Court decision having far-reaching repercussions.

Invoking Section 3 of the 14^th amendment, which bars anyone that has “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” from federal office, is a highly controversial move. To Trump’s supporters, this represents an anti-democratic ploy to deny them their right to vote for the former president, and they are outraged by what is perceived by many to be a partisan attack.

To his opponents, Trump’s removal from the ballot is greatly welcomed, with their disdain for the former president and fear of his electoral prospects clear for all to see. But Roman history warns us that those who wish to see Trump defeated outside the ballot box should be wary of the unexpected consequences of such a move. Ancient Rome and the death of Caesar provides an uncomfortable lesson to Washington.

In the late Roman Republic, Gaius Julius Caesar was the most controversial politician of his day. Caesar’s rise to power was marked by glory, success and ruthless competence: a string of military victories in Hispania Ulterior (modern day Spain and Portugal) had seen him elected to the highest position in Roman politics, the consulship, in 59 BC.

Subscribe now

In the years that followed, a temporary political alliance, known as the First Triumvirate, was agreed between Caesar and two fellow political heavyweights, Pompey and Crassus. The alliance was shaky – Pompey was Rome’s foremost general, with his own ambitions, and Crassus was a shadowy billionaire who had whole swathes of Roman politics in his pocket. The death of Crassus and a growing rivalry between Pompey and Caesar brought the First Triumvirate to an end in 53 BC, but the alliance had allowed Caesar to maintain a powerful hold over Roman politics.

Just as politicians today frequently flirt with populism to gain a political advantage, Caesar also had his own history of populist politics. He supported land reform measures during his consulship to tackle the growing mass of urban poor languishing across the city, and supported a popular measure to return the election of priests.

But Caesar was also a talented politician and an excellent administrator. This is demonstrated by his first enactment as consul in 59 BC, in which he required all measures passed by the Senate and popular assemblies to be publicly published, to encourage the accountability of elected officials. However, Caesar’s ambition, success and political tactics left him with no shortage of enemies.

Conservatives in the Senate viewed Caesar as a dangerous firebrand and a threat to the established order, and a conservative faction known as the Optimates, led by the staunch conservative Marcus Porcius Cato, looked to thwart him wherever possible. But further military victories in Gaul cemented Caesar’s position as a first-rate general – and an immensely popular politician among the Roman people.

The clash between the conservatives and Caesar reached a boiling point as 50 BC approached, when the conservatives in the Senate tried to have Caesar’s command in Gaul revoked on legal grounds. The Lex Pompeia Licinia had granted him a five-year command in 55 BC, but before his command had finished, Caesar was already facing attempts to recall him to the city. As the terminal date of his command approached, calls for Caesar to step down or be reassigned to a distant province grew in strength.

His decision to defy their proclamation and cross the Rubicon in 49 BC would leave Rome facing a bloody civil war, and Caesar now confronted Pompey, his former political ally, on the battlefield.  After four years of civil strife, Caesar returned to Rome victorious – and as the undisputed master of Roman politics.

Politics and freedom

Following his victory, Caesar began to consolidate power and disregarded the senatorial elite. He collected a number of titles, including dictator perpetuo (dictator in perpetuity), which left Roman senators fearing that the republic was slipping into autocracy.

Caesar’s heavy use of propaganda, including displaying his own image on coins – a first for the republic – and frequent public displays of power left his enemies feeling they had no choice but to act, and a conspiracy was born.

A group of prominent senators, including Brutus and Cassius, devised a plan to assassinate Caesar and restore traditional republican values. On the Ides of March, 44 BC, Caesar was ambushed as he entered the Senate and assassinated by the conspirators.

With this act of violence, the conspirators had killed their tyrant. But the political ramifications that were to follow would have dangerous and unexpected consequences. The aftermath of the assassination was marked by chaos, with the conspirators scrambling to take the initiative and prevent Caesar’s supporters from seizing back control.

Far from restoring the republic, the assassination of Caesar would do the exact opposite. The ensuing power struggle would bring Rome back into a series of bloody civil wars, with Caesar’s adopted son, Octavian (later known as Augustus) eventually rising to power and installing himself as the first Roman Emperor.

Cicero, who was not party to the conspiracy, later said the conspirators showed the "courage of men and the foresight of children." The conspirators believed the assassination of Caesar would restore the traditional Roman establishment and save the republic, but instead, it resulted in its death.

From Rome to Washington

The lesson of Brutus, Cassius and the conspirators holds true today. Opponents of Caesar believed that recalling him from Gaul in 50 BC would curtail his power, but instead it led to civil war. Likewise, they later believed that by taking his life on the Senate floor, it would end his legacy and restore a traditional form of politics. Both attempts resulted in the exact opposite outcome.

For politicians today, attempts to disqualify Trump from the ballot box or use legal means to frustrate his campaign may provide themselves with a sense of short-term satisfaction, but its long-term consequences could be extremely dangerous.

The move will only increase the alienation many American voters feel from the political establishment, while also provoking counter-attempts by Trump’s allies to target President Joe Biden with a similar stunt. In the long run, this will only inflame tensions at an already highly polarized point in American history, and risks dragging the country in a volatile direction.

Opponents of Trump may believe they have the best of intentions, but as Ancient Rome shows, politics can be cruel, unpredictable and unforgiving. Defeating Trump at the ballot box, and not trying to sidestep him, is the only way forward.

That is not to say that any politician should be above the rule of law, but that underhanded, partisan attempts to remove an opponent from the political arena can often backfire. The death of Caesar serves as a stark warning - beware of how you destroy your opponent, because it might just come back to bite you.

In international affairs, political developments are often dictated by crises, catastrophes and tragedies. Many of the geopolitical dramas of the past century have been driven by a reaction to a perceived threat or external crises – and when it comes to national security, fear can become the greatest motivator.

Never was this more evident than during the Cold War, where an atmosphere of fear and paranoia ran like a thread through the tapestry of global politics. External plots, coups and confrontations marked the clash between the Soviet Union and the United States, as both sides devised their foreign policy through the lens of mutual suspicion.

For the Soviet Union, this sense of paranoia made political developments within their sphere of influence particularly troublesome, with the Kremlin holding a deep-seated fear of dissent. It was against this backdrop that one of the cornerstones of the later Cold War, the Brezhnev Doctrine, was devised. To understand how the Brezhnev Doctrine came into being and what it meant for global politics, we must first turn to events in another corner of the Eastern Bloc: Czechoslovakia.

Since the end of the Second World War, Czechoslovakia had remained solidly within the Soviet sphere of influence - but by the 1960s, the communist system and pro-Soviet regime was beginning to struggle. The Czechoslovak economy was sluggish and slow, and dissatisfaction with the regime became widespread among the population.

As communist authority slowly eroded, the government attempted to oversee a period of reform, with the hard-line leader Antonin Novotný launching his ‘New Economic Model’ in 1965. This would move the country away from the Soviet blueprint of heavy industrialization, which proved to be less suitable in Czechoslovakia than elsewhere due to the country already having a strong level of industrialization prior to the war.

The Prague Spring

However, demands for economic reform quickly evolved to include political reform, and Novotný was replaced by the reformist Alexander Dubček, who promised to rejuvenate society and create ‘socialism with a human face’. It was at this moment that the Prague Spring was born.

In January 1968, Dubček introduced his program of political and economic liberalization. This aimed to end 20 years of strict communist rule by removing censorship, restrictions on travel and the media, and supporting the promotion of political debate. The reformers tried to push through their program within the confines of Marxism-Leninism, but conflicts quickly broke out between the reformers and those who felt the changes had gone too far.

In the Kremlin, the Soviet leadership watched the Prague Spring with concern. With memories of the 1956 Hungarian uprising still fresh in their mind, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and the communist party feared that radical reform in Czechoslovakia would spark a domino effect across the Eastern Bloc, leading other Warsaw Pact countries to distance themselves from the Soviet system and move in their own direction.

It is important to remember that the Eastern Bloc did not just represent Soviet ideology, with Eastern Europe filled with Marxist-Leninist states after the Soviet occupation of the region. It was also a buffer zone between the West and the Soviet Union, and its nations served as Moscow’s own security guarantee.

This was a lesson the Soviets learned painfully during the Second World War. Between 1941-1945, the Soviet Union defended itself from a brutal and merciless German invasion, but at a catastrophic cost. The Soviets lost between 24-27 million lives during the war, with large parts of the western Soviet Union reduced to ruins.

What the Soviets learned from this experience was the importance of having buffer states between hostile powers to its west and its own territory, and the Kremlin was determined to ensure any future war would not be fought on Soviet land. To Brezhnev, the growing independence of Czechoslovakia was therefore completely unacceptable from both an ideological and a geopolitical standpoint, and the Soviet Union decided it had to intervene.

The Soviet response was unsparing. On the night of 20-21 August 1968, 250,000 Soviet-led troops from Warsaw Pact countries crossed the Czechoslovak border – the largest invasion Europe had seen since the war. Soviet troops, alongside those from Poland, Hungary, East Germany and Bulgaria in a supporting role, quickly took Prague and other major cities, despite protests from the locals. The occupation proceeded rapidly, and 137 Czechs and Slovaks were killed and hundreds more injured during the invasion.

The Soviet crackdown was heavy and decisive, although passive resistance and protests continued for months, with the newly installed government reversing Dubček’s reforms.  Despite protests from Czechs and Slovaks, the country was firmly brought back in line with Moscow – and the Prague Spring was over.

Soviet force, global diplomacy

The crushing of the Prague Spring would introduce the latest Soviet vision of international politics to the rest of the world: the Brezhnev Doctrine. In short, the Brezhnev Doctrine was a statement that the Soviet Union reserved the right to interfere in the internal affairs of other socialist nations. This would pose a direct challenge to both the US and the Soviet Union’s potential socialist allies.

The Soviets correctly predicted the US response. American entanglement in Vietnam and its past policy of non-intervention in the Eastern Bloc left the US protesting the invasion, but nothing more. Lyndon B. Johnson cancelled a planned summit with Brezhnev in response to the invasion, and arms control talks between the two sides were delayed, but beyond a failed resolution in the UN Security Council (blocked by the Soviets) the US, NATO and its allies favoured a policy of reducing tensions.

The Brezhnev Doctrine would have a significant impact on Soviet foreign policy elsewhere. Soviet grip on the Eastern Bloc was strengthened, with any hopes of dissent in those countries dashed by the affair. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 was driven by the Brezhnev Doctrine, as was the Sino-Soviet Split - with ties between Beijing and Moscow strained in the aftermath of the invasion, as Beijing feared a Soviet intervention under the same justification.

Driven by a mixture of traditional Soviet security demands and ideological concerns, the Brezhnev Doctrine would have far-reaching consequences on the global stage, with Moscow crucially reaffirming Soviet dominance over the Eastern Bloc.

This would come at the cost of straining relations with other socialist nations, leaving reformers in the Eastern Bloc and beyond to distance themselves from Moscow – with a coldness towards Soviet policy prominent within the reform movements that swept through Eastern Europe in the 1980s. But ultimately, the Brezhnev Doctrine is a brutal lesson in great power politics, with the Soviets utilizing brute force to control affairs within their sphere of influence.

In 1946, leaders in the United States, Europe and the Soviet Union understood that the world was at a crossroad. At the end of World War Two, the relationship between the two great world powers – the US and the Soviet Union – would come to dominate the geopolitical scene, leaving onlookers to closely watch any signals from Moscow and Washington to try and understand their intentions.  

Analysing the ideology, fears and ambitions of the American capitalists and Soviet communists became crucial to understanding world affairs, with both sides of the Atlantic still coming to terms with the nature of the civilizational clash known as the Cold War that was to follow.

For the historian, the reliance on primary sources and original evidence can be both our greatest tool and our most significant source of frustration. Backroom deals, informal discussions and destroyed documents can leave historians with an incomplete picture, with our understanding of world history often left to conjecture or guesswork.

It is fortunate that when it comes to the Cold War, and specifically the founding principles of US-Soviet relations, the Long Telegram provides a window for historians to understand this crucial period of world history. The Long Telegram was a response given by George F. Kennan, Deputy Chief of Mission at the United States Embassy in Moscow, in February 1946 to a Treasury Department request for an assessment on Soviet policy – specifically around the Soviet decision to decline participation in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank.

The response that they and the wider US diplomatic community received was not quite what they had expected. Kennan’s telegram was a masterpiece of political analysis: over 5000 words long, it contained a thorough assessment of Soviet politics, drawing on a range of themes from Marxist ideology to Russian history, alongside his views on how the US should approach the Soviet Union in the post-war era.

The Long Telegram was later expanded on and published in Foreign Affairs magazine in July 1947 under the title “The Sources of Soviet Conduct”, with Kennan writing anonymously as ‘X’ under instruction from the State Department. Known as the X Article, Kennan would proceed to develop his argument and lay the intellectual foundations for the US policy of containment towards the Soviet Union. So, what argument did Kennan present, and what was its long-term impact?

Kennan and US-Soviet Relations

Central to the view Kennan developed in both the Long Telegram and the X Article was his deep understanding of Russian history – and Bolshevism in particular. The early years of the Soviet Union, beset by a bloody civil war and foreign intervention by Western powers, made the communist leadership view dictatorial power as a complete necessity.

The transition of power to Stalin after Lenin’s death had ended the chance of any reduction of this dictatorial power, and the nature of the Communist Party meant the co-existence on a permanent basis of rival sources of power was unacceptable to the Kremlin.

Kennan emphasized that the Kremlin leadership was primarily motivated by their own security: both in terms of internal threats and plots, and pressure from the outside world. This was both the nature of Soviet ideological doctrine and a result of Russian history.

This instinct became increasingly influential in Soviet foreign policy as the internal role of capitalism was swept away in the years after the Russian Civil War, with the absence of a capitalist threat at home making the existence of a capitalist threat from abroad even more necessary.

To the Soviet eye, capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction, and imperialism (as the highest form of capitalism) can only lead to war and revolution. Hence, the outside world was inherently aggressive and hostile, but doomed to failure, with the Soviet Union tasked with ensuring the survival of the party until the inevitable proletarian revolution took hold in the capitalist world. As Stalin said himself in 1924: “as long as there is a capitalist encirclement there will be danger of intervention with all the consequences that flow from that danger.”

In essence, Soviet policy towards the outside world was therefore driven by the necessity of explaining, maintaining and defending its dictatorial policy at home. Soviet actions domestically (such as political repression, secret police and gulags) may make foreign powers more hostile to the state, but the notion of a hostile world must be maintained to justify that oppression.

The need of the party to remain the sole source of legitimate authority in Soviet society also meant that the state must be infallible. Therefore, truth becomes not an immutable, objective reality, but the day-to-day view espoused by Stalin and the Communist Party. In Kennan’s words, truth was whatever serves the Kremlin leadership “because they represent the logic of history.”

In both the Long Telegram and X Article, Kennan posited that this was not solely a product of Marxist philosophy, but also a result of Russian history. An agricultural society surrounded by nomadic marauders to the east and more developed states to the west, Russian leaders had historically seen themselves as constantly threatened by the outside world.

Subscribe now

Conscious of their archaic and primitive political system, Russian rulers felt threatened by their internal weaknesses, and saw foreign influence – both directly in a politico-military sense and indirectly through outside ideas and concepts – as a challenge to their authority and position.

The influence of climate, agricultural development and political traditions from the Asiatic world all left Russian rulers feeling challenged by the outside world – and this heavily influenced Russian foreign policy throughout the centuries. Hence, Kennan identified that Russian rulers were naturally hostile to the outside world, viewing contact between European powers and their own people as a destabilizing influence, which risked the collapse of their regime.

Soviet conduct

In Kennan’s eyes, the necessity of presenting an external enemy to their own people explained many of the characteristics of Soviet foreign policy: secretiveness, extreme suspiciousness, a tendency for duplicity and a generally hostile approach to international relations. In the X Article, he noted:

“If the Soviet Government occasionally sets its signature to documents which would indicate the contrary, this is to be regarded as a tactical manœuvre permissible in dealing with the enemy (who is without honor) and should be taken in the spirit of caveat emptor. Basically, the antagonism remains.”

Kennan stressed that this did not mean that the Soviet threat was imminent, but that it was permanent. Given the socialist understanding of the ‘inherent contradictions’ of capitalism, its fall did not have to be immediate, and indeed, foreign adventures and revolutionary activity that in turn brought pressure on the Soviet Government would be actively avoided by the regime.

To Kennan, the internal system of Soviet politics and its ideological commitment to the overthrow of capitalism was both a spotlight and a cloud over Soviet foreign policy. He viewed the Soviets as being more willing to back down and compromise when facing superior force, safe in the knowledge that the defeat of capitalism was inevitable and therefore non-urgent in the short term.

Kennan warned that, on the other hand, this ideological strand left the prospect of a single, conclusive victory through one battle or confrontation as impossible, with the Soviets not discouraged by even severe setbacks. This meant the US and its allies would need a strategy of long term, patient and firm commitment to halting Soviet power – or in other words, containment.

In essence, Kennan concluded that a tough but measured approach to the Soviet Union, in which the US would “remain at all times cool and collected and that its demands on Russian policy should be put forward in such a manner as to leave the way open for a compliance not too detrimental to Russian prestige.”

He noted that the Soviet political system, with its ridged political hierarchy, total need for obedience and disconnect between rulers and subjects could in turn leave the Soviet Union vulnerable in the long term, with its ability to transfer power effectively between leaders still an unproven element of Soviet politics in the late 1940s. In his closing remarks, Kennan summarized the coming contest of the Cold War as follows:

“The issue of Soviet-American relations is in essence a test of the over-all worth of the United States as a nation among nations. To avoid destruction the United States need only measure up to its own best traditions and prove itself worthy of preservation as a great nation.”

The lessons of containment

Kennan’s views would lay the framework for US policy towards the Soviet Union in the years to come. In 1947, the Truman Doctrine declared American intentions to provide economic and military support to nations threatened by communism. One year later, the Marshall Plan would provide economic aid to countries devastated by the Second World War, with its humanitarian ambitions serving a key political objective – to prevent the spread of communism in Europe.

In 1949, NATO was established as a military alliance of Western nations with the objective of utilizing collective defence to protect against Soviet expansion. In other words, these measures would use economic and military levers to contain Soviet influence and prevent the spread of communism without provoking a direct military confrontation.

Kennan would eventually become a critic of how various US administrations implemented his policy of containment. He stressed that the changing emphasis from his own focus on diplomatic, economic and political pressure to a growing military arms race risked a direct confrontation with the Soviet Union – which ran counter to his original vision.

Kennan would continue to champion a more nuanced version of containment throughout the Cold War, in which the limitation of communist influence via non-military means would eventually bring about an American victory.  

In essence, through the Long Telegram and X Article, Kennan concluded that just as the Soviet leadership believed capitalism produced the seeds of its own destruction, Soviet totalitarianism could also do the same. He portrayed the looming Cold War as a clash of civilizations, with Soviet policy being deeply rooted in both the early years of the young Soviet state and the wider experience of Russian history.

While others urged the US to come to terms with the Soviet regime, or pushed for a policy of direct confrontation with Moscow, Kennan used his deep understanding of Soviet politics to sketch a very different geopolitical strategy. The Long Telegram provides us not only with a direct insight into Kennan’s policy of containment, but also the wider ideological clash between the two camps of the Cold War.

If today’s politicians are to take a lesson from the Long Telegram, it is that to defeat your enemy, you must first understand their history, politics and internal system. Kennan understood this – and the Western world today is undoubtedly better off because he did so.   

It is no surprise that since the Cold War ended, the study of democratic peace theory as a political concept has gained in popularity. The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the position of the US as the world hegemon famously led to “The End of History”, in which a liberal democratic world order was supposed to prevail, bringing peace, prosperity and increased interconnectivity.

It is also no surprise that, in the current age, the relationship between democratic states and war has also come under increased scrutiny. The destabilization of the liberal democratic world order, including the Russian invasion of Ukraine and conflicts in the Middle East, has meant that understanding war and its causes is once again in fashion.

Subscribe now

Democratic peace theory is at the heart of the 21^st century liberal world order, with proponents of the theory viewing it as the key to a more peaceful, stable and prosperous world. But in a world increasingly challenged by war and beset with instability, the debate over democratic peace theory is becoming more important than ever – and more controversial.

War and peace

Democratic peace theory revolves around one key concept: that fundamentally, democratic states are more peaceful in their foreign policy and almost never go to war with one another. The theory is commonly associated with Immanuel Kant, who in Project for a Perpetual Peace (1795) espoused the idea that the foundation of a lasting peace would rely on collections of democracies who share “republican constitutions”.

The great champion of democratic peace theory, or a liberal view of international relations, in the 20^th century was Woodrow Wilson. Wilson justified US entry into the First World War in 1917, despite campaigning against involvement during the 1916 Election, on the grounds of making “the world safe for democracy.” In his Fourteen Points (1918), Wilson outlined that the promotion of democracy in Europe and the encouragement of free trade were vital to establishing a permanent peace after the conclusion of the war.

Others in the liberal camp of international relations have taken this stance later in the 20^th century, including Bill Clinton and Tony Blair in the 1990s – who oversaw a strategy of “democratic enlargement” and justified interventions in places like Kosovo by emphasizing the security element of democracy promotion.

Democratic peace theory is underlined by a couple of core concepts. Firstly, the political system of democratic states means they are more peaceful in their relations with one another and far more likely to resort to diplomacy to resolve disputes, as opposed to armed conflict. There are several reasons why this is the case:

1. Public opinion: Democratic politics constrains the ability of democratic leaders to march their countries into war, with the necessity of maintaining popular electoral support making protracted and bloody conflicts a less attractive option. In a democracy, a greater level of political support is needed for a war within the population than in an authoritarian regime.

2. Checks and balances: The checks and balances within a democratic system, such as strong public institutions, accountability of elected officials and the need to form political coalitions with other parties, makes starting and waging a war more difficult than in autocratic states, where the whim of a sole ruler or party reigns supreme.

3. Transparency: Democratic states are transparent, where elements like a free press, public debate and an open bureaucracy make preparing for war and planning pre-emptive attacks far more difficult than in closed states. This in turn has a stabilizing effect internationally, deescalating tensions with competitor states by taking the immediate prospect of a surprise attack off the table.

4. Political and economic interdependence: democratic states are more likely to cooperate with each other politically, economically and internationally. The strong ties between democratic nations therefore makes them less likely to resort to war with one another.

Democratic peace theory presents a ‘systemic’ vision of international politics and global order, in which an increased number of democratic states in the international system will in turn make global politics more dovish and peaceful.

The link between democracy and war is not deterministic and presents a general theory of international relations, with conflicts between democracies far less likely to occur but not completely non-existent. Examples of war between democratic states have been argued by historians and scholars, although they often involve extenuating circumstances or the presence of anti-democratic elements in one or more of the states (known as a ‘hybrid democracy’).

To take one example – Britain and Finland. During the Second World War, Britain and Finland went to war with one another, despite both being democratic states and the two nations previously having good relations. Finland’s position between the authoritarian Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany made British support a useful counterweight to its neighbours, but on 3 December 1941 Britain declared war on Finland.

Britain’s declaration of war was a concession to the Soviet Union, who had become a British ally earlier in the year when Germany launched an all-out invasion (Operation Barbarossa) of the USSR in June – and Finnish involvement in Barbarossa had left London and Helsinki on opposite sides of the war. Although Winston Churchill and Cabinet Member Harold Macmillan were hesitant to declare war, with Churchill stating that the declaration “would not assist either our cause or that of the Russians”, Britain found itself pressured into declaring war on a fellow democracy.

But the declaration of war between Britain and Finland was not the result of a direct military confrontation between two democratic states, but stemmed from the uprooted geopolitical situation that arose during the war, with former allies becoming enemies and political alliances shifting in unexpected ways.

Although British bombers had attacked the Finnish port of Petsamo in July 1941 - prior to the declaration of war - due to Soviet reports that it was being used by the Germans, the war was essentially a diplomatic concession by the British as opposed to a full-scale war.

Share Great Power Politics

Churchill and the Finnish Commander-in-Chief Carl-Gustaf Mannerheim were even on good terms with one another, with Churchill writing to Mannerheim in a personal capacity during the Winter War (1939-1940).

This example highlights that while examples of wars between democratic states can be found in the annals of history, they involve unusual circumstances or democracies experiencing high levels of anti-democratic pressure.

Can democracy really prevent war?

Democratic peace theory has no shortage of critics. Those most opposed to the theory are realists, who believe that the international order is anarchic, with states inherently competing with each other in a struggle for power. Realists see international politics as being driven by the desire of states to achieve security, and not ethical or philosophical considerations.

The main criticism of democratic peace theory is that its conclusion is backwards, or in other words: democracy does not lead to peace, but peace leads to democracy. Those countries who have resolved conflicts with neighbouring states, have a high degree of internal stability and do not face major external challenges are far more likely to transform into democracies than countries facing immediate external threats.

Additionally, critics have noted that while a country undergoes a transition phase from a non-democracy to a democracy, the instability, weak institutions and rapid change inherent in this process may in fact make it more susceptible to war and conflict.  This explains many of the examples of democracies, or hybrid regimes, that have fought wars against one another (discussed above), which critics have again pointed to as proof that democratic peace theory is far from perfect.

Unless a more rigid definition is used, excluding transitioning states and hybrid regimes, it is clear that there is a wide spectrum between peaceful democracies and some of the less stable semi-democracies. Continued conflict between India and Pakistan since 1947, including a number of border skirmishes in recent years, serves as one example.

Finally, the importance of economic interdependence as a source of peace has been called into question. A highly interconnected Europe in 1914 and 1939 failed to prevent war, and the so-called ‘New Cold War’ between the US and China today (both of which are massively economically interconnected) would suggest economic interests alone cannot stop war.

So, can democracy really prevent war? The evidence shows that in general, democratic states are far less likely to go to war with one another, and that an international system built around democratic nations is one in which wars would be less frequent, less bloody and have limited consequences. Democratic states are also unlikely to descend into internal conflict, such as civil wars or ethnic violence, and provide a more stable geopolitical scene.

But as the realists show, democracy promotion alone cannot solely be the basis of that global order. The instability of the transition to democracy, the presence of non-democratic nations in the international order and the nature of flawed democracies and hybrid regimes makes democracy promotion an admirable ideal, but nonetheless a utopian one. Democracy helps to build a more stable world order, but it cannot be the sole basis of international politics.   

The history of Anglo-Soviet relations since the Russian Revolution is filled with deception and disinformation. The two European powers, who began the First World War as allies prior to the Bolshevik takeover of the country, were in many respects natural rivals. Britain was an imperial power, with an empire that spanned the globe, whilst the early Soviet Union remained committed to global revolution and decolonization.

The magnitude of the Russian Revolution in 1917 meant that the question of Britain’s relationship with the Soviet Union remained a key foreign policy challenge for any British government – and this made influencing British domestic politics an important objective of Soviet foreign policy.

The ideological clash between Britain and the Soviet Union in the years after the revolution laid the groundwork for one of the most controversial and intriguing political scandals in British history, with the politicians of a century ago having to tackle the same challenges over ‘fake news’ that we see today. The Zinoviev Letter was a political conspiracy that would linger over Westminster in the inter-war years, casting a dark shadow over the British establishment and intelligence apparatus.

Britain and Russia

In 1924, Britain was experiencing something that had never happened before in the history of the country – a Labour government was in power. The December 1923 general election had seen the formation of a minority Labour government under the leadership of Ramsay MacDonald, with support from the Liberals under H.H. Asquith.

One of the key policy questions MacDonald needed to address was his approach towards the Soviet Union. After Imperial Russia fell under Bolshevik control during the Russian Revolution, relations between the two countries had collapsed.

The Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War, supported by Britain, France and the US, saw Britain actively support the Whites against the Bolsheviks on the battlefield. This meant the question of dealing with Russia would be especially contentious, with the British establishment highly hostile to the fledgling communist state.

The new Labour government looked to transform Anglo-Soviet relations and normalize ties between the two countries. To do this, MacDonald aimed to negotiate two treaties with the Soviets: the first covering Anglo-Soviet trade, and the second to address the question of repaying British bondholders that had loaned the Imperial Russian government billions before the revolution and were now left out of pocket.

This resulted in accusations from the right that the Labour Party held sympathy for the communists, with the Security Services in particular holding deep concerns over the influence of communism in Britain.  

The situation reached a boiling point in August 1924, when MacDonald’s government dropped a case against J.R. Campbell, editor of the Workers Weekly, a newspaper produced by the Communist Party of Great Britain. In the paper’s July edition, a provocative article called on members of the armed forces to side with the communists:

“Soldiers, sailors, airmen, flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone, the Communist Party calls upon you to begin the task of not only organising passive resistance when war is declared, or when an industrial dispute involves you, but to definitely and categorically let it be known that, neither in the class war nor a military war, will you turn your guns on your fellow workers, but instead will line up with your fellow workers in an attack upon the exploiters and capitalists, and will use your arms on the side of your own class…

Refuse to shoot down your fellow workers!
Refuse to fight for profits!
Turn your weapons on your oppressors!"

Sir Patrick Hastings, the Attorney General for England and Wales, advised the government to bring charges against Campbell under the Incitement to Mutiny Act, but pressure from sympathetic Labour backbenchers saw the charges dropped – setting the scene for a Parliamentary showdown.

Liberals and Conservatives in the House of Commons passed a motion that a Select Committee should investigate the circumstances around the affair. Labour’s defeat on the motion by 364 to 198 would remain the largest government defeat in the Commons until the 2019 Brexit vote, and MacDonald had no choice but to view the motion as a vote of no confidence and dissolve the government, calling a general election for 29 October 1924.

The Zinoviev Letter

As the Conservatives, Liberals and Labour went into campaign mode and vied with one another for votes, the Secret Intelligence Service received a surprise letter. The letter was sent by Grigory Zinoviev, President of the Executive Committee of the Communist International, to the Communist Party of Great Britain, and it contained a trove of damning evidence against the Labour Party.

Zinoviev claimed in the letter, dated 15 September, that the Labour government planned to push ahead with the normalization of economic and diplomatic ties with the Soviet Union, and detailed the advantages this could present to the Communist Party of Great Britain. This included providing an economic boost to the Soviet Union, alongside allowing the Soviets to spread their influence within the British Empire and ferment revolutionary fervor among the British proletariat.  The letter proclaimed:

“A settlement of relations between the two countries will assist in the revolutionising of the international and British proletariat”

and that MacDonald’s foreign policy:

“will make it possible for us to extend and develop the propaganda of ideas of Leninism in England and the Colonies.”

Zinoviev then turned his attention to the details of the supposed revolution that MacDonald’s policies would foreshadow, stating:

“it would be desirable to have cells in all the units of the troops, particularly among those quartered in the large centres of the country, and also among factories working on munitions and at military store depots. We request that the most particular attention be paid to these latter.”

In essence, the letter was a damning indictment of MacDonald’s foreign policy and his reconciliatory approach towards the Soviet Union – and it had arrived at the worst possible time, just before he was set to face a crucial general election.

Propaganda or fact?

Within the government, the Zinoviev Letter caused a great deal of uncertainty. The Secret Intelligence Service took the public stance that the letter was authentic, but doubts remained about its authenticity.  However, with the Foreign Office pushing to publish the letter despite opposition from the Prime Minister, the Daily Mail also received two copies of the letter – which they published themselves on 25 October, only a few days before the general election - and other right-wing publications quickly picked up the story.

The affair bolstered Conservative accusations of communist influence within the Labour Party, with hostile media sources being only too happy to broadcast the story to the British public. With the Labour Party already trailing heavily in the polls, the Zinoviev Letter ended any hope of an unlikely upset in the general election, and the Conservatives won a major victory – returning Conservative leader Stanley Baldwin to Downing Street.

Subscribe now

Almost immediately, those implicated in the letter refuted their involvement. Zinoviev himself denied responsibility for the letter and claimed it was a forgery, and MacDonald also cast doubt on its authenticity.

But within the government, civil servants and British intelligence had widely accepted that the letter was authentic, leaving MacDonald and Labour with little choice but to accept defeat. Before leaving office, he told his cabinet that he felt “like a man sewn in a sack and thrown into the sea".

Many within the Labour Party suspected they had been set up by British intelligence and individuals within the civil service, who had published the document to derail Anglo-Soviet relations and deny any possibility of a Labour government.

A subsequent investigation, led by the new Conservative government, found that the Zinoviev Letter was likely to have been a genuine document, but historians have since cast doubt on the investigation’s findings. Even today, the letter’s origins are still shrouded in mystery. Some historians have put the blame on Russian monarchists working out of Riga or Berlin, who they claim had forged the letter in Zinoviev’s name to strain relations between the Bolsheviks and London.

The role of the Security Services has also been called into question. Whilst there is no evidence to suggest they were involved in the letter, the willingness of British intelligence to believe in its authenticity and communicate this publicly provided credibility to the notion that communist forces held influence over British politics. Although the full extent of their role is shrouded in mystery, a stench of foul play certainly lingers around the affair on the part of British intelligence.

The wider impact of the Zinoviev Letter has also been questioned. Historians like A.J.P Taylor have pointed out that whilst the letter did not necessarily have direct electoral consequences, as Labour was already unlikely to win the 1924 election, it did have wider implications for domestic British politics and Anglo-Soviet relations.

Domestically, the affair delayed reforms in the Labour Party, with Labour politicians blaming Security Services and the establishment for their defeat. In foreign policy, the incident caused a rift between the British and the Soviets, with the British government under Baldwin taking a more hardline attitude towards Moscow and leaving the Soviet Union increasingly isolated on the international stage.

In the years that followed, Britain maintained a highly anti-Soviet foreign policy, even when Stalin’s philosophy of ‘Building Socialism in One Country’ became the dominant Soviet position and the aspirations of the early Soviet state for international revolution were dropped.

Whether the work of Russian monarchists or another anti-Soviet group, the Zinoviev Letter showcases that the use of false stories to shape the political narrative is certainly nothing new – and with support from an intelligence apparatus that was hostile to Labour’s foreign policy, those who opposed a Labour government were able to influence the political narrative. Today, ‘fake news’ is a commonplace tactic in international relations, but the Zinoviev Letter shows that it has a long and controversial past.

A golden rule of geopolitics is that wars can often turn great rivals into close allies. The alliance between Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union during the Second World War is one such example: a great imperial power of the 19^th century, a new world power in the Western Hemisphere and a totalitarian communist state, all brought together to defeat Nazi Germany.

The Grand Alliance was undoubtedly an uneasy one, but its protagonists had many reasons to maintain their relationship and continue cooperation until the end of the war – and beyond. Between Soviet manpower, US armaments and British resolve, from 1941 onwards the Allies recognised that their alliance was necessary to defeat Germany, Italy and Japan, avoiding any temptation to agree a separate peace with the Axis Powers.

As the war came to an end in 1945, both sides still shared several common interests. The Soviets, ravaged by nearly four years of bloody combat against Germany since June 1941, would view a continued supply of US goods to be an important tool for its post-war reconstruction, whilst hoping that US capital would also help to finance the rebuilding of the nation.

From a US perspective, the Soviet market could provide a crucial outlet for American products. With the great economies of Europe and Asia in ruins, real GDP in the US soared by 72% between 1940 and 1945, with the US accounting for more than 50% of global GDP.

Subscribe now

Government officials and business leaders in the US believed that the looming problem of overproduction (as the US war economy scaled down) could be eased by selling goods to the Soviets. Economically speaking, both sides of the Grand Alliance saw an advantage in close cooperation.

But positive US-Soviet relations post-1945 would not just offer economic opportunities in the short term, but also provide a long-term security guarantee. Neither the US nor the Soviet Union wished to become involved in another war in the immediate aftermath of World War Two – and especially not against one another, given the enormous military and economic might both sides held.

But the Grand Alliance collapsed and relations between the West and the Soviets quickly deteriorated after the war. Given there were so many reasons to continue cooperation, the split between the Western Allies and Stalin was both complex and ideological.

Quarrels over Soviet actions in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, the question of post-war Germany and reparations for the Soviets, and the removal of Germany as a common enemy after its surrender all contributed to this breakdown. But whilst these fractures emerged in force towards the end of the Second World War, the question of the second front would prove to be a continuous source of tension throughout the war.

The second front

Almost immediately after being drawn together as allies, the opening of a second front in Western Europe dominated discussions between Britain, the US and the Soviets. On 18 July 1941, only weeks after the Germans launched their invasion of the Soviet Union, Stalin asked Churchill to launch two additional fronts: one in France and another in the Arctic.

To the Soviets, the second front had obvious benefits: It would immediately take pressure off the Red Army in Eastern Europe, whilst also splitting German forces across the continent. But for Britain (and later the US, upon joining the war in December 1941), a second front also had clear advantages. It would allow the Western Allies to directly influence affairs on the European continent and prevent Stalin from agreeing a separate peace deal with Germany, as Soviet Russia had done in 1918.

Despite Soviet pressure, a firm commitment for a second front would not come until 1942, when Roosevelt agreed with Molotov in Washington that Britain and the US would launch an invasion of Europe later in the year. This promise was however made on political, and not military, terms. British and American military advisors cautioned that any move in 1942 was too risky, and a plan to land a small contingent of troops in northern France (to test German strength, rather than to establish a foothold) was vetoed by the British.

Churchill pushed for the less risky alternative of an Allied landing in North Africa, which Roosevelt eventually came around to, and in August 1942 Churchill would deliver the news personally to Stalin in Moscow. The dictator was deeply unhappy with the revelation that the second front would be delayed and lost his temper with Churchill, asking whether British soldiers were afraid to fight the Germans. Averell Harriman, diplomat and later US Ambassador to Moscow, recalled the confrontation in stark terms:

“Stalin took issue at every point with bluntness, almost to the point of insult, with such remarks as ‘You can’t win wars if you aren’t willing to take risks’ and ‘You must not be so afraid of the Germans.’ This phase of the discussion ended by Stalin stating abruptly, but with dignity, that he could not force action [by the Allies] but he did not agree with the arguments….”

A memorandum sent by Churchill to Stalin after the meeting reiterates his argument for avoiding a second front in Europe:

“The Germans have enough troops in the West to block us in this narrow peninsula with fortified lines, and would concentrate all their air forces in the West upon it. In the opinion of all the British naval, military and air authorities the operation could only end in disaster.

“Even if the lodgment were made, it would not bring a single division back from Russia. It would also be far more a running sore for us than for the enemy, and would use up wastefully and wantonly the key men and the landing craft required for real action in 1943. This is our settled view.”

Put simply, the Western Allies believed that the logistical challenges of a second front in Europe were too great to overcome in the short term, and doubted whether they had the military capability to pull off a successful landing in France. Stalin was left furious – but would have no choice but to accept the decision.

The soft underbelly

With an immediate second front in Western Europe now off the table, the Western Allies focused their attention for 1942 on North Africa (Operation Torch), where they defeated the German and Italian forces in May 1943 – before launching an invasion of Italy in September. Plans for a second front in Northern France - codenamed ‘Overlord’ - only began to pick up steam in 1944, but even at this stage of the war the question of a second front was hotly disputed.

An alternative proposal, led by American diplomat William Bullitt and supported by Winston Churchill, involved opening a second front in the Balkans as opposed to France and striking at what Churchill called the “soft underbelly” of the Axis powers through Yugoslavia and Greece, alongside the ongoing campaign in Italy.

Share

Supporters of Churchill’s soft underbelly strategy perceived access to the Balkans as a way to pin German resources down and bleed Hitler dry whilst avoiding a riskier confrontation in Western Europe, with Churchill promoting a long-established element of British foreign policy – control of the Mediterranean and British imperial territory in the region.

But the Balkan plan was ultimately opposed by Roosevelt, who was keen to prioritise military considerations over all else and saw a second front in France as a key military objective to ending the war. The second front in Western Europe would finally arrive on 6 June 1944, when the Western Allies landed on the beaches of Normandy.

Worsening relations

Despite the Western Allies eventually opening the second front that Stalin so dearly wanted, the geopolitical implications of the debate over its timing would have profound consequences. Despite Operation Overlord taking place only when the Western Allies deemed the logistical and military position to be suitable, it would come nearly three years after Stalin first called for it.

The delays left the Soviets deeply suspicious about Anglo-American intensions, with Stalin believing that the Western Allies were content to let the war be won through Soviet blood, whilst Britain and America sat on the sidelines and avoided heavy sacrifices.

Despite the Western Allies sending the Soviets over 10 million tonnes of war materiel between June 1941 and June 1944 to support the Red Army, Stalin always remained suspicious that his capitalist allies would try to agree a separate peace with Hitler themselves or abandon the Soviets at the first opportunity – and disagreements over the timing and location of the second front only exacerbated this tension.

However, the delay to the second front was a result of Anglo-American insecurity instead of duplicity. Both Churchill and Roosevelt were keenly aware that they needed Soviet support to defeat Germany, and when D-Day came, only 90 German divisions faced the Western Allies in France and Italy, as opposed to 250 on the Eastern Front. Military and logistical concerns were the key consideration of the Western Allies (especially Roosevelt), but to Stalin, the far greater Soviet burden appeared to be intentionally exacerbated by the Anglo-Americans.

With the Red Army in the ascendency across Eastern Europe, the second front played a political alongside a military role, as the issue drove a wedge between the Soviets and the Western Allies throughout the war. Whilst it was certainly not the only issue between the two sides, it would serve as a precursor to the collapse of US, British and Soviet relations post-1945, with lingering suspicions of Anglo-American duplicity remaining a key driver of Soviet foreign policy throughout the early Cold War.